A minor horror called cold-in-the-head. Nicolas, by three ominous sneezes, would give the sign; following which, every member of the household was stricken in turn, or in chorus; sometimes a solitary sufferer; sometimes a veritable orchestra of coughs and sniffs and trumpetings and throat-clearings. The talk would be all of handkerchiefs and the lack of hot water; and the faces round the dining-room fire would swell into a circle of grotesque caricatures, blotched, and red-eyed, and hideous. No respite, none! and seven long months of it to be faced.
"... We shall be back on Tuesday"—and already the ghost of Nelly was calling over the banisters for someone to fasten her frock—how the hooks would persist in catching those irritating stray hairs at the back of the neck! Already Edward was turning on the bath-taps; Muriel practising for two hours after tea; Nicolas spurting affection with a jammy mouth. Thus the members of her family, when they finally did return, were by anticipation distorted from quite ordinary figures to horrible marionettes whose slightest action set every nerve itching.
"Well, Katty dear," affectionately Nelly embraced her sister-in-law in the hall, calling her by the name most disliked; "here we are, you see."
Kathleen did see.
She saw also that Edward avoided her eyes, and that Nelly was nervous; while Muriel, aged nine, regarded her aunt curiously, as having been for many meals past the object of horrified conversation on the part of the elders.
Nicolas alone seemed unaware of any tension in the atmosphere. Up the stairs he staggered, a miniature Falstaff; laden to the ground by the burden of his own flesh, and, in addition, an iron spade, a wooden spade, a fishing-net, and two tin pails; relics of summer joys that were fled. Kathleen went to his assistance, listening sympathetically to his breathless explanations of how he wouldn't leave them behind for the landlady's little girl; Kathleen gathered that the landlady's little girl had always cast an eye of appropriation on that iron spade.
"An' I said: 'You won't have it, never!' An' I hit her knees wiv it." Nicolas collapsed triumphantly on the nursery floor; he was evidently a firm believer in the methods of the cave-man.
Kathleen rather liked Nicolas, despite jamminess. His years were five, and his voice was fat. When poked, he gurgled. Once indeed she had been moved to embrace him tenderly, to which moment his mother had unfortunately been witness. Kathleen's subsequent existence was spent in striving to correct the misapprehension that she possessed the maternal instinct. Nicolas had to suffer.
On the other hand, Muriel was no favourite. There was that small matter of practising to account for it; still more, the fact that she was a younger pupil at the establishment where her aunt was installed as teacher of history and arithmetic. From the schoolgirl point of view, this latter condition of things opened up vast fields of thought. Muriel, very neat about the legs and mind, was particularly concerned with the ethics of the situation. To be intimately connected with Authority was an awkwardness to which none of her mates were exposed, and involved a special code of law.
Was it a matter to be bragged about, for instance, or relegated to a shamed obscurity? What was the precise moment every day when careless familiarity must yield to awed respect, and vice versa? Was she justified in selling (for J nibs) details of Kathleen's home existence to Kathleen's infatuated adorers? Or did this come under the category of "hateful mean?" How could one avoid walking to school in company with Authority, when she and Authority left the same house at the same moment, bound in the same direction? In what spirit was punishment to be received, when she who punished had that morning been reprimanded before one's very eyes, for Encouraging the Cat? Above all, what was the good of striving for the first place in an exam. when you know jolly well it will be denied you—"for fear of being accused of showing favouritism"?