Today is Thursday.
The girl had stopped and stood open-mouthed listening to Pippi and Tommy and Annika forgot to eat any more pears, utterly absorbed in the story. Pippi continued that the man had more children than he could count and the littlest one was named Peter. Tommy interrupted that a Chinese baby couldn't be called Peter. Pippi answered that that was what his wife had said to him, but the man had been dreadfully stubborn and he had said the baby should be called Peter or Nothing and then he had sat down in a corner and had pulled his ears over his head and had howled and his poor wife had had to give in and then the baby had been called Peter. She continued that the baby had been the hatefulest kid in all Shanghai, and he had been fussy about his food, so that his mother had been most unhappy. She asked them if they knew that people ate swallows' nests in China. She told them the mother had sat there with a whole plate full of swallows' nests, trying to feed the baby, and the mother had persuaded him to eat some swallows' nests for Daddy, but Peter had just shut his mouth tight, shaking his head, and at last the man had become so angry that no new food should be prepared for Peter until he had eaten a swallows' nest for Daddy, and when the man had said something, that had been that, so the same swallows' nest had ridden in and out of the kitchen from May until October, and on the fourteenth of July his mother had begged to be allowed to give Peter a couple of meatballs, but the man had said no.
