“She is not going to stop,” Isadora warned, reaching to adjust Violet’s bonnet, which the baby promptly yanked off.
“She’ll find something else to look at.”
“James, she has not blinked.”
He turned around.
Violet extended one arm toward him. “Ha.”
“She wants you to come closer,” Isadora explained.
“She wants a great many things,” James drawled. “She wanted to eat my cravat this morning when I went to say good morning to her. I did not comply with that either.”
“That was sensible. This is less so.”
He looked at her then, the sideways look he deployed when he found something mildly irritating and mildly amusing in equal measure.
Then Violet made a sound.
He took one step back toward the blanket. Violet’s arm lowered, and she immediately returned her attention to the flowers.
“There,” he said. “You see?”
“The matter is concluded because you did what she asked.”
“I did not do what she—” He stopped and looked at Violet, who was now examining a daisy with the utmost indifference. “This child is going to be an extraordinary problem.”
“She already is,” Isadora said cheerfully. “Come and sit down.”
He sat on the edge of the blanket.
Violet glanced at him, returned to the daisy, and held out the daisy to him without looking up. “Take.”
He took it.
“Thank you,” he said, turning it once between his fingers.
Isadora looked at the lake because his expression at that moment was not one she had been invited to witness.
The afternoon was mild, the lake entirely still, the old trees at the water’s edge sending their reflections straight down into the dark without disturbance.
Mrs. Plum had been persuaded into a garden chair thirty feet away with her knitting, close enough to be summoned and far enough to be comfortable, and Violet had been presented with the contents of the flower basket Isadora had brought out with optimism, knowing the basket would last approximately twenty minutes before its contents were redistributed across the blanket, the grass, and one small person.
She had been correct.
Violet was currently holding three flowers in her left hand, two in her right one, and examining a sixth with her mouth, which Isadora gently removed.
“Not that one.”
Violet looked at her. “No, no.”
“I know,” Isadora murmured. “It seems unfair, but it is not.”
Violet crawled closer to James and held out another one of the flowers in her left hand with the magnanimous air of someone offering a significant gift.
“Thank you,” James said seriously.
Violet handed one to Isadora and quickly retracted it.
