I soon found, however, that to punish him for social misbehaviour would not always be possible, because most of his naughtiness in this respect was due to nerves. It seemed to be a penalty attaching to his really unusual beauty that I should be unable to show it off. Many and many a time I took him to literary and artistic gatherings only to find myself obliged to send him home with his nurse before any exhibiting of him had been possible. The least excitement would throw him into such a fit of nerves as made even his grandmothers learn new wisdom about childhood.
He was never gleeful. He had the sweetest, gladdest smile in the world, but there was always an underlying sadness in him that worried the many good people who imagine that if a child is happy it must needs be jumping about and laughing more or less noisily. And a great grief came to him at this time when his first nurse left to be married.
Fond though he was of me, he was yet so unhappy over this that he was very nearly ill. How different children's characters are! His sister, The Bystander, then three months old, never cared who nursed her. Nurses might come and nurses might go, but as long as she was fed and bathed and looked after, she cared not a tinker's curse.
And then there came two very important new-comers to the household—a black puppy, and the elderly woman who from then till now has been known as the Old Nurse.
Oh, that Old Nurse! what would she say now if she were watching and waiting here with us for her Master Roland to come home on leave, instead of lying in her grave as she has been for eighteen months, where the alarms of war reach her not!
CHAPTER III THE FIRST STEPS OF THE LITTLE FEET
There is nothing like smells, or clothes, for bringing back the past. The scent of the American currant will always bring my childhood back to me when even music could not do it. The hardest-hearted criminal can be softened sometimes to yielding and to tears by some smell that brings back an old home life long since forgotten. In the same way the sight of clothes worn in other days sends the memory darting back across the years. So it was with me when I was rummaging among my Little Yeogh Wough's things and found a pink linen coat and knee breeches and a little white-frilled shirt that had been worn with them.
That little pink linen suit lit up the past for me just as a lamp lights up a dark place into which it is suddenly carried.