"I think I'd rather be like father," he said meditatively; "that would do just as well. To be a dean you've got to be a parson first, and I'd much rather be a soldier, like father."
His mother turned her head hastily so that the child could not see her face.
"You can be like your uncle in character whatever your profession; it is there I would have you resemble him."
"But," interrupted Roger, "father's a stainless gentleman too, isn't he? And he's much more jollier than Uncle Ambrose."
His mother did not answer, and to the child such silence seemed charged with chilly omen. He did not ask her, as he longed to do, what she exactly meant by a stainless gentleman. He was sure that in some incomprehensible fashion the stainlessness of great-Uncle Ambrose reflected unfavourably upon his father and resented it accordingly. He was also sure that this enviable quality had nothing to do with personal cleanliness, for there was no one in the whole world so clean and smart as father. Why, when he drove to a distant meet, he wore "two pinafores," one in front and one behind, to keep his leathers spotlessly white; the said pinafores, by the way, doing much towards reconciling Roger to the wearing of his bib at meals.
The nursery window was open and the soft spring rain whispered pleasant things to the grass; but Roger did not listen. For the first time in his life he was weighing evidence; and the worst of it was, that, do as he would, the bulk of the evidence all went into one scale.
"They're just as fond of me," he thought to himself, "but somehow they're never with me together." There were no jolly drives into the town now—those drives in the high dog-cart when he would sit between them rapturously thinking that never had little boy such resplendent parents. Now, mother always went in the "bucket" with his little sisters, and when father took him out driving, mother did not even come and stand on the steps to wave them a farewell. She never sat on father's knee now, or called him a "ridiculous boy," or untied his necktie, or rumpled his hair. She seemed always to sit as far off as possible, and when she did look at her big, jolly husband, there was that in her expression which Roger felt he would rather not understand.
The truth was that Roger the elder and Lettice his wife, having been at one time rather demonstratively fond of one another, found it somewhat difficult to keep up appearances since such time as began the state of affairs their little son so deprecated. Lettice certainly flattered herself upon the secrecy and dignity with which she attended to the linen less well-bred people will sometimes insist upon hanging up to the public gaze even before it has gone through the cleansing process, and was quite unconscious that all the while her servants discussed the affair exhaustively, her friends pronounced the position untenable, and her little son grieved and wondered, casting about in his child mind for some way of clearing an atmosphere which even he felt was so charged with electricity as to be well-nigh intolerable.
The rain ceased whispering, but the trees took up the story and rustled importantly, shaking their glistening leaves at the sun who winked lazily in the west. The two little sisters called to Roger to come and have tea with the dolls; but he shook his head impatiently, thrusting it between the bars of the window that he might not hear them. A robin on the hawthorn hedge below regarded him in friendly fashion and sang a song of coming summer; but Roger saw nothing but a blurred little splash of crimson against the green, for his eyes were full of tears.
"Father, what's a stainless gentleman?" he asked as they went together in the evening to feed the big carp in the pond.