It was very monotonous.
Breakfast was at eight o’clock, and Lydia found herself expected to partake of bread-and-milk, to which she was not accustomed, and which rather annoyed her because she knew they only gave it to her in order to satisfy Grandpapa’s old-fashioned sense of the appropriate.
Immediately after breakfast she went out, so as to give Aunt Beryl time to see to the housekeeping before her lessons.
“A good brisk walk up and down the Front,” her aunt said encouragingly. “There are never many people there early.”
After September, indeed, there were hardly ever any people there at all.
Lydia did not dislike her solitary promenades from one end of the Esplanade to the other, except on the days when there was an east wind, when she hated it.
At first she was allowed to take Grandpapa’s dog, Shamrock, with her, although with many misgivings on the part of Aunt Beryl. Shamrock was reputedly a Sealyham terrier, and Grandpapa was inordinately attached to him. He roared with laughter when Uncle George said angrily that the dog made a fool of him by flattening himself under the front wheel of the bicycle which daily conveyed Uncle George to his office; and when Shamrock made all Regency Terrace hideous with howls, on the few occasions that Uncle George kicked him out of the way, Grandpapa’s deafness immediately assailed him in its most pronounced form, and he assured his daughter that he could hear nothing at all, and that it was all her fancy.
“Good little dog, Shamrock,” said Grandpapa approvingly, when Shamrock prostrated himself in an attitude of maudlin affection before the old man’s arm-chair, as he invariably did, to the disgust of the household.
He also showed himself scrupulously obedient to Grandpapa’s lightest word, although unfortunate Aunt Beryl might still be hoarse from prolonged cries at the hall-door in a vain endeavour to defend the bare legs of hapless little passing children, whom Shamrock took a delight in terrifying, although he never hurt them.
Lydia liked Shamrock because he always pranced along so gaily, and wagged his tail so effusively, and also because she suspected him of more than sharing her dislike of the parrot.