“Can you see colours for each day of the week?”
Quentillian wondered whether he had looked as much alarmed as he had felt, in his utter bewilderment.
“I think Monday is blue, and Tuesday light green, and Wednesday dark green,” Adrian had then proclaimed, triumphantly, and casting his big brown eyes about as though to make sure that his three sisters had heard the enunciation of his strange creed.
“Adrian is not a bit like other little boys,” one of them had then said, with calm pride.
Owen Quentillian, unconscious of irony, had ardently hoped that she spoke truly.
Adrian had pinched him surreptitiously during tea, and had laughed in a way that made Owen flush when they had asked him what India was like and he had answered “I don’t know.”
He had thought the thick bread-and-butter nasty, and wondered if there was never any cake. A vista of past teas, with sugared cakes from the drawing-room, especially selected by himself, and brought to his own little table on the back veranda by the Ayah, made him choke.
There had been a dreadful moment when he had snatched at the horrid mug they had given him and held it before his face for a long, long time, desperately pretending to drink, and not daring to show his face.
Lucilla, seated at the head of the table, had offered the others more tea, but she had said nothing to the little strange boy, and he still felt grateful to her.
The miserable, chaotic jumble that was all that his mind retained, of interminable slices of bread-and-butter that tasted like sawdust, of thick, ugly white china, of hostile or mocking gazes, of jokes and allusions in which he had no share, all came to a sudden end when he had given up any hope of ever being happy again so long as he lived.