Boy of My Heart

by Marie Connor Leighton

It had always been a wonderful thing that I should love him as I did—I who had never felt my heart yearn towards children. But he had been to me in a sense a child of atonement. When he was born I had said to myself that I would atone by devotion for many sins of selfishness which I need not particularise here.

But, then, it was easy enough to worship him in any case. For even in his earliest babyhood he had the peculiar gift of Style. He helped one to live, just as a beautiful flower does, or a great poem or picture.

There are so many people in this world who are Impoverishers! They don't know it. Most of them wouldn't even know what you meant if you told them they belonged to the great all-round cheapening class. Yet there they are, always making everything about them look worse than it is. Some of them are so far gone in want of style that if they went to Buckingham Palace they would immediately make it look like a shoddy place in Acton or Wandsworth. On the other hand, there are a few rare and blessed souls who would make a pigsty look a proper abode for royalty.

It has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do with clothes. It has only to do with Self.

My Little Yeogh Wough is one of these.

From the first week of his life he made everybody about him live up to their income. He mutely demanded the best of everything, even while his mere presence lent a charm and glory to the worst of things. I had had ideas of a four-and-sixpenny woollen hat and a ten-and-sixpenny pelisse as quite good enough for any baby; but when I looked at him I saw that it had to be a thirty-five shilling hat and a four-guinea cloak. Somehow or other, he made his nurse quite a distinguished person to look at, while he himself soon became a delight to the eye, with his big, brown velvety eyes, his exquisite skin, his mass of shining curls and his portly little body—so portly that it looked as if it were artificially inflated and a puncture by a pin might cause a collapse.

"I can't understand how it is," a friend said to me once. "As a rule, babies, like cats, make a place look common, but he never does. He's got a sort of kinghood about him."

This was true of him then as it is true of him to-day. And I was reverent. But there were times when I was afraid. For I am a believer in Compensation, and I know that where your special pride and joy are, there shall you only too surely be stricken.

If you are proud of your bodily beauty, then in that beauty shall you be degraded. Not for you then shall be the disease that comes in the leg or the toe or in some wholly unobtrusive place where no one need know of it. To you it will come either in the eye, so that you have to wear an eyeshade, or in the form of a skin disorder, so that the fairness and perfectness of your complexion may be lost to you. I have read of one of our most successful business men that his great passion in life being the taking of country rambles with a botanical interest, he had told himself that when he had made enough money to be fairly comfortable in life he would give up working and devote himself to walking as a hobby; but just as his business began to be successful he became paralysed in the lower limbs, and thenceforward could only go about in a bathchair.