So the box was packed. Mabel, Maurice’s kiddy sister, cried over everything as it was put in. It was a very wet day.
‘If it had been any school but old Strong’s,’ she sobbed.
She and her brother knew that school well: its windows, dulled with wire blinds, its big [p6] alarm bell, the high walls of its grounds, bristling with spikes, the iron gates, always locked, through which gloomy boys, imprisoned, scowled on a free world. Dr. Strongitharm’s was a school ‘for backward and difficult boys.’ Need I say more?
Well, there was no help for it. The box was packed, the cab was at the door. The farewells had been said. Maurice determined that he wouldn’t cry and he didn’t, which gave him the one touch of pride and joy that such a scene could yield. Then at the last moment, just as father had one leg in the cab, the Taxes called. Father went back into the house to write a cheque. Mother and Mabel had retired in tears. Maurice used the reprieve to go back after his postage-stamp album. Already he was planning how to impress the other boys at old Strong’s, and his was really a very fair collection. He ran up into the schoolroom, expecting to find it empty. But some one was there: Lord Hugh, in the very middle of the ink-stained table-cloth.
‘You brute,’ said Maurice; ‘you know jolly well I’m going away, or you wouldn’t be here.’ And, indeed, the room had never, somehow, been a favourite of Lord Hugh’s.
‘Meaow,’ said Lord Hugh.
‘If you think cats have such a jolly time,’ said Lord Hugh, ‘why not be a cat?’
‘Mew!’ said Maurice, with scorn. ‘That’s [p7] what you always say. All that fuss about a jolly little sardine-tin. Any one would have thought you’d be only too glad to have it to play with. I wonder how you’d like being a boy? Lickings, and lessons, and impots, and sent back from breakfast to wash your ears. You wash yours anywhere—I wonder what they’d say to me if I washed my ears on the drawing-room hearthrug?’