Chapter 25

PART III, XXV

IN the persistent drizzle of a Paris winter morning Susy Lansing
walked back alone from the school at which she had just
deposited the four eldest Fulmers to the little house in Passy
where, for the last two months, she had been living with them.

She had on ready-made boots, an old waterproof and a last year's
hat; but none of these facts disturbed her, though she took no
particular pride in them. The truth was that she was too busy
to think much about them. Since she had assumed the charge of
the Fulmer children, in the absence of both their parents in
Italy, she had had to pass through such an arduous
apprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her waking
hours was packed with things to do at once, and other things to
remember to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but at
times they were like an army with banners, and their power of
self-multiplication was equalled only by the manner in which
they could dwindle, vanish, grow mute, and become as it were a
single tumbled brown head bent over a book in some corner of the
house in which nobody would ever have thought of hunting for
them--and which, of course, were it the bonne's room in the
attic, or the subterranean closet where the trunks were kept,
had been singled out by them for that very reason.

These changes from ubiquity to invisibility would have seemed to
Susy, a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of many
characteristics not calculated to promote repose. But now she
felt differently. She had grown interested in her charges, and
the search for a clue to their methods, whether tribal or
individual, was as exciting to her as the development of a
detective story.

What interested her most in the whole stirring business was the
discovery that they had a method. These little creatures,
pitched upward into experience on the tossing waves of their
parents' agitated lives, had managed to establish a rough-and-
ready system of self-government. Junie, the eldest (the one who
already chose her mother's hats, and tried to put order in her
wardrobe) was the recognized head of the state. At twelve she
knew lots of things which her mother had never thoroughly
learned, and Susy, her temporary mother, had never even guessed
at: she spoke with authority on all vital subjects, from
castor-oil to flannel under-clothes, from the fair sharing of
stamps or marbles to the number of helpings of rice-pudding or
jam which each child was entitled to.

There was hardly any appeal from her verdict; yet each of her
subjects revolved in his or her own orbit of independence,
according to laws which Junie acknowledged and respected; and
the interpreting of this mysterious charter of rights and