The Fourth Pig by Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner Page A

bit worried because all morning Mary didn’t seem to be attending the way she’d always done before, and she’d have been more worried if she’d known that Mary was thinking about that young traveller, George Higginson, and how he was due back in Birmingham that day. It was queer for Mary, because she could still remember how she used to think about him, but she didn’t think like that any longer. She was wanting him to take her to the pictures and her to sit next him, and she knew already somehow just how she’d let him know by sitting a bit closer—and how his hand would come creeping over onto her knee, creeping under the edge of her frock—Well, that wasn’t what she ought to have been thinking at school, not about a young fellow that had given another girl the chuck, but still, one can’t blame her. Most girls would be like that with that kind of a mother.
    Next day she told Mrs. Smith that she and George Higginson were going to get married the end of the month. Mrs. Smith was as pleased as Punch; she thought it was her doing. They weren’t so pleased at the school, for it meant an end to all the scholarship plans. The head mistress had her up and gave her a talking to, telling her what a fine thing it would be for her to go to the University, trying to get her all worked up about it like she used to be. But Mary just stood there, grinning a bit, looking as pretty as ever but somehow very aggravating for the head mistress, and all she’d say was—No, she was getting married.
    She was like that all the time till the wedding; George Higginson told her to drop all this schooling—what was the good of it for a commercial traveller’s wife?—he didn’t want a scholar, he wanted a pretty kid to come back to evenings, and take out to pictures or cuddle up at home, a pretty kid to squeeze up to, to keep a chap out of mischief—and by God, she was a warm little kid now! And Mary giggled and said yes, that was right, she didn’t want any more silly old school. And she made herself peach and mauve undies, and when young George came in she hid them and then let him see a corner. Oh well, they always say the nicest time in a girl’s life is when she’s engaged to a fellow, don’t they?
    So Mary Snow got married to George Higginson, and then—well then, she just seemed to melt away, to fade right out some-how. Like an ice-cream sundae on a hot afternoon. Some girls do seem to go like that after they get married. But I’ve never known it to happen to anyone like it did to her. Sudden-like. “That poor little Mrs. Higginson,” I said to my boy only last Sunday, “she just seems to have melted away. There’s no other word for it.” Once again the Snow Maiden, daughter of January and April, was hated by the sun-god, the man-god, the god of life and potency. Once again he caught her and touched her with his rays, and once again the Snow Maiden melted away, was dissolved into nothing, became no more than a story which is ended.
    HANSEL AND GRETEL
    Once upon a time there was a boy and a girl called Billy and Minnie Jones, and they lived in Birmingham, just like you and me. Billy was a big, lumpy, grinning boy, not quite ten, and his sister Minnie was a bit more than a year younger; because she was little and pretty and merry, she was mostly called Minnie Mouse. Their father was a mechanic, but he had been out of work for the best part of two years and had dropped out of his Union and out of the brass band he used to play in—it made him feel uncomfortable meeting the other chaps now he’d only got the one suit for Sundays and weekdays and he got to think everyone was staring at him at the band practise, so he stopped going. But he and another fellow had a bit of an allotment between them, and he spent a good lot of time down there. All the same, Mrs. Jones used to say he got that hungry after working that it wasn’t