The Fourth Pig by Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner

them one at a time under her arm-pits hoping they’d warm up soon; she didn’t mind being cold really, not like some—mostly she worked better so. But it was all nothing to how cold her mind was: it was just as thoughthere wasn’t anything in the world would ever be able to warm it up again.
    So she began to write marks on a piece of paper, the same as if she’d been figuring out one of those kind of examples you get in the Advanced, and she wrote out some long numbers, with decimal places in them and all that, and she put them together into sums. Only they were a queer kind of sum, and while she was doing that she kept on talking to herself. And when it was all finished and cancelled out, her mother came down through the skylight, her mother April, all in a dazzle of pale sparkly sunshine, with trimmings of green like what you always forget in winter, and then one Sunday you take a bus-ride off into the country, and it’s all new, newer than your new Spring hat, so new and clean and surprised looking, if you see what I mean, that you don’t hardly like to touch the grass under the bushes or the silly little beech leaves all beginning again. It was the same as that with April, she didn’t look as though she ought to be touched. But all the same, oh she was kind and sweet and gentle, and Mary shut her eyes and snuggled up against her, and she felt like her feet were treading in soft warm moss and her hands were spread out in the sun, and “Mother,” she said, “Oh Mother, I want what Bert and Betty’s got!”
    Then April’s face, it got all still and solemn, like the last minute before a rain-storm, and she said: “You remember about the Sun.”
    â€œYes,” said Mary. “I remember and I don’t care. I won’t go on just being Snow.’”
    And April said again: “You have to decide, but if you choose wrong, it will be too late afterwards.”
    But Mary said: “I’ve got to understand. It spoils everything if I don’t know this. Once and for all, Mother, I have chosen. Make me understand. Give me what they’ve got. I don’t want to be different any longer.”
    And April said: “I can’t keep it from you now. You have chosen.” And there were tears in her eyes, as it might be great still raindrops on the end of a pussy willow bough before you break it off to take home. But Mary didn’t see that.
    And then all sorts of things came edging along and getting at Mary. Pretty things mostly: primroses and cowslips and lambs and that, and misty soft mornings and evenings like you’d feel all mazed in, hearing bells from somewhere at the back of the elm trees: and little brown bubbly streams coming down between ferns; and the first cuckoo and the first tulips, and the last of the big daffodils: and plum blossom like you see it on each side of the Bromsgrove Road going down into Worcestershire, and blue sky and little white clouds, and split-sticky chestnut buds. And some of the things weren’t exactly pretty, but they got at her all the same, things, you know, like frogs in a pool, croaking like mad and messing and heaving about in the dirty water till you don’t know which way to look, hardly—Well, there they were, all April’s creatures let loose on Mary Snow. And by and bye she let go her hold on her mother and she lay back, smiling a bit, and the next morning she woke up in bed but she couldn’t remember how she’d got undressed, and when she tried to remember she began to giggle, all by herself under the bed-clothes. And when she got up she didn’t once look at her books, but she spent the best part of half an hour trying to fix her hair a new way, like she’d seen inan advertisement in the Herald . And she was late for school the first time for months.
    Her teacher didn’t scold her, because she’d got so used to Mary being the best in the class, but she got a