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All this time Padraig and Viola O’Neill visited the Majestic every day and roamed around with the twins, who had swiftly tired of helping with the decorations. For a few days they continued playing their game of dressing up Padraig as a girl. All of Angela’s clothes were spilled out of their trunks, cupboards and packing-cases; the dresses that suited him were put in one pile, those that didn’t in another. For a while they found this engrossing enough, but presently the job was finished. Just as interest was once again beginning to subside Viola remembered that they still had to consider the rest of Padraig’s clothing, his underwear, petticoats, corsets and so forth. Soon they were all bubbling with hilarity as they struggled with eye-hooks and tugged on the strings of Angela’s corsets—not that Padraig’s shapely body needed any artificial correction of course, but they thought they might as well do the thing properly. After a day or two of trying to persuade the Major to go upstairs and have a look at Padraig clad variously in a camisole, a nightdress, and Angela’s 1908-style swimming-costume (all of which invitations the Major declined firmly) the question of underwear similarly began to pall. It was clearly time to look for a new game.

The girls mooned about aimlessly for the next three or four days, telling people that they were bored and asking them for money—so that they could run away to Dublin and get raped like everyone else (they weren’t too sure what this meant but it sounded interesting). Padraig, however, continued to dress up and sit with the ladies or glide along corridors with whispering skirts. Indeed, he had become such a familiar sight that scarcely anyone paid any attention to him now beyond, say, an absent-minded smile or a “Yes, dear...that is a lovely dress.” The truth was that most of the ladies had probably forgotten by this time that he wasn’t, in fact, a girl. Only once did he provoke a strong reaction: Mr Norton unaccountably exploded with anger one day and shouted: “Get out of my sight, you filthy little swine!” Everyone considered this to be amazing behaviour, but then old Mr Norton had always been considered uncouth, in spite of his mathematical genius. Padraig was made a special fuss of that day to compensate for his hurt feelings.

One bright, chilly December afternoon the Major came upon Padraig on one of the upper landings, standing mournfully by a window. He was dressed in a glistening evening dress of powder-blue satin with gloves to match and he wore a string of pearls round his neck. The Major felt sorry for him. He looked very lonely standing there by himself. With a sigh the Major moved to the window to see what he was looking at. The view from here was almost identical with that from Angela’s room: there stood her “two elms and an oak,” the oak supposed to be a hundred and fifty years old, the edge of a path where the dogs sometimes wandered...and beyond, beyond what Angela’s clouding eyes had been able to descry, the ground sloped down to a wood. Walking up from this wood were the twins and Viola, escorted by a couple of young Auxiliaries who were laughing and prancing about them, throwing their berets in the air like schoolboys. The girls clung tightly together but looked charmed nevertheless. They had found a new game.

In the course of the next few days the Major glimpsed them all together once or twice again, walking and laughing in some distant part of the grounds. Sometimes Padraig would be in the vicinity too, not with them but sulking hopefully at a distance (ignoring them when they shouted at him, however). The Major clicked his tongue. He should really tell Edward that the twins were meeting the young Auxiliaries. But these days it was no use telling Edward anything! Moreover, Edward was taking advantage of his good nature, there was no doubt about it, leaving him to do everything while he amused himself chopping up rats in the ballroom. Depression came