“I am thinking it is funny,” he said. “It is funny that I should like such a little girl such a lot. She is years and years younger than I am. But I like her so. It is such fun to tell her things.” He marched over to his mother’s writing table and leaned against it. What his mother saw was that he had an impassioned desire to talk about this child. She felt it was a desire even a trifle abnormal in its eagerness.
“She has such a queer house, I think,” he explained. “She has a nurse and such pretty clothes and she is so pretty herself, but I don’t believe she has any toys or books in her nursery.”
“Where is her mother?”
“She must be dead. There is no lady in her house but the Lady Downstairs. She is very pretty and is always laughing. But she is not her mother because she doesn’t like her and she never kisses her. I think that’s the queerest thing of all. No one had ever kissed her till I did.”
His mother was a woman given to psychological analysis. Her eyes began to dwell on his face with slightly anxious questioning.
“Did you kiss her?” she inquired.
“Yes. I kissed her when I said good morning the first day. I thought she didn’t like me to do it but she did. It was only because no one had ever done it before. She likes it very much.”
He leaned farther over the writing table and began to pour forth, his smile growing and his eyes full of pleasure. His mother was a trifle alarmedly struck by the feeling that he was talking like a young man in love who cannot keep his tongue still, though in his case even the youngest manhood was years away, and he made no effort to conceal his sentiments which a young man would certainly have striven to do.
“She’s got such a pretty little face and such a pretty mouth and cheeks,” he touched a Jacqueminot rose in a vase. “They are the colour of that. Today a robin came with the sparrows and hopped about near us. We laughed and laughed because her eyes are like the robin’s, and she is called Robin. I wish you would come into the Gardens and see her, mother. She likes everything I do.”
“I must come, dear,” she answered.