“I thought I’d seen pictures of dogs running after sheep, and barking at them to make them go the right way.”
“Sheep-dog! That’s another matter. Sheep are not lambs, child—nor is this the season for lambs.”
Uncle George looked happier, having found an opportunity for the bestowal of information.
Lydia secretly thought him very like Mr. Barlow in “Sandford and Merton,” and had no idea that her comparison was anything but complimentary.
“Have you ever read ‘Sandford and Merton,’ Uncle George?” she inquired conversationally. She had no idea of simulating a conventional grief for her mother with Uncle George, knowing instinctively that any such display would merely embarrass him. Uncle George liked one to be intelligent and very attentive to everything he said. Lydia had often asked him questions, the answers to which left her profoundly indifferent, merely for the sake of pleasing him. Her unconsciously cynical acknowledgment to herself of her own motives at least saved her from the charge of insincerity.
Lydia had seen so little of her grandfather during the last three years that she could not remember what he liked from little girls, although she retained a vivid impression, mostly gathered from her mother, that Aunt Evelyn’s noisy, slangy, hockey-playing Beatrice and Olive were not approved of by him.
Lydia, the precocious little only child of a mother half-enviously and half-contemptuously acknowledged to be “rather a fine lady” by the Raymonds and the Senthovens, was not likely to transgress in the same directions as Beatrice and Olive.
When Aunt Evelyn appeared at the dining-room door with her summons, Lydia followed her demurely upstairs. She remembered the steep, rather narrow staircase, with a blue carpet that gave place abruptly on the second flight to yellow oilcloth, and the ugly blue paper on the walls, quite well.
The drawing-room seemed altogether strange to her, but she was given no time to examine it.
“Here is little Lydia, Grandpapa,” said Aunt Beryl, who stood as though on guard behind the arm-chair in the bow window, that looked out on to a distant strip of grey sea.