“And when,” she added, “I tell you to come to your mother, you must come and kiss me.”
This last item she further impressed upon him by the gift of an orange, and then asked him if he understood.
After scratching his head meditatively for some moments, he looked into her comely face with very steady blue eyes and said:
“I don't think so—not quite.”
“Then,” replied his stepmother angrily, “you are a very stupid little boy—and you must go up to the nursery at once.”
This puzzled Jem still more, and he walked upstairs reflecting deeply. Years afterwards, when he was a man, the sunlight falling on the wall through the skylight over the staircase had the power of bringing back that moment to him—a moment when the world first began to open itself before him and to puzzle him.
It happened that at that precise time when Mrs. Agar was endeavouring To teach her little stepson the usages of polite society, a small, keen-faced man was standing near the table in the smoking-room in the Hotel Wagstaff at Suez. He was idly turning over the newspapers lying there in the hopes of finding something comparatively recent in date.
Presently he came upon a copy of the Times, with which he repaired to one of the long chairs on that verandah overlooking the desert which some of us know only too well.
After idly conning the general news he glanced at the births, deaths, and marriages, and there he read of the recent ceremony in the parish church of Clapham.
“D——n it!” he muttered, with that racial love of an expletive which makes a Jew a profane man.