Such a gay supper as they had that night! Katy would not take her old place at the tea-tray. She wanted to know how Elsie looked as housekeeper, she said. So she sat on one side of papa, and Clover on the other, and Elsie poured the tea, with a mixture of delight and dignity which was worth seeing.
"I"ll begin to-morrow," said Katy.
And with that morrow, when she came out of her pretty room and took her place once more as manager of the household, her grown-up life may be said to have begun. So it is time that I should cease to write about her. Grown-up lives may be very interesting, but they have no rightful place in a child"s book. If little girls will forget to be little, and take it upon them to become young ladies, they must bear the consequences, one of which is, that we can follow their fortunes no longer.
I wrote these last words sitting in the same green meadow where the first words of "What Katy Did" were written. A year had pa.s.sed, but a cardinal-flower which seemed the same stood looking at itself in the brook, and from the bulrush-bed sounded tiny voices. My little goggle-eyed friends were discussing Katy and her conduct, as they did then, but with less spirit; for one voice came seldom and faintly, while the other, bold and defiant as ever, repeated over and over again, "Katy didn"t! Katy didn"t! She didn"t, didn"t, didn"t"
"Katy did!" sounded faintly from the farther rush.
"She didn"t, she didn"t," chirped the undaunted partisan. Silence followed. His opponent was either convinced or tired of the discussion.
"Katy didn"t." The words repeated themselves in my mind as I walked homeward. How much room for "Didn"ts" there is in the world, I thought What an important part they play! And how glad I am that, with all her own and other people"s doings, so many of these "Didn"ts" were included among the things which my Katy did at School!