Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/91



six is seventy-nine," observed Lucilla; "seventy-nine pence—how many shillings, and whatpence?"

Jane told her, and waited patiently till the agony of the shillings column had given place to the easy sparseness of the pounds. It was Saturday night, and they were "making up the books."

"I make it three pounds seventeen and fivepence," Lucilla announced at last. "See what you make it." Jane made it four pounds two and a penny. So then they added it all up again, the two of them together, and the total was four pounds three shillings and fourpence.

"This is too much!" said Jane desperately.

"Yes," said Lucilla, "much too much!"

"I mean it's too silly. Here we've been a thousand years at school, and you took an arithmetic prize when you were nine . . ."

("'Sundays at Encombe,'" put in Lucilla).

". . . And yet we can't add up six little sums of pounds, shillings, and pence and then add the totals together and get them right."

"We don't know that we haven't got them right. One of the answers may be right for anything we know. It's so different doing it with real money," said Lucilla, fingering the little piles of coin on the table of the garden room, where, with two candles in brass candlesticks to light them, they were seeking to find some relation between the coins—so easily counted—and the figures referring to these same coins which all through the week they had laboriously pencilled in an exercise-book.