When Little Yeogh Wough was at home he usually slipped in at a well-chosen moment by his particular door and, locking the two other doors on the inside, remained master of the situation, while various other members of the family, and notably his father, stormed outside. The boy had always been a fanatical devotee of the Bath, and since he has been in the trenches and personal cleanliness has been difficult, he has become more so than ever. He loves his room because of this door leading into the bathroom, and more so still because of the long mirror set in the door on his own side.
For he is vain, my Little Yeogh Wough. There is nothing effeminate about him, though he knows a great deal of womanly lore and could, for instance, choose the right lace for a particular gown as well as I could do it myself. There is nothing of the tailor's or hairdresser's dummy about him, with clothes looking like those pictured in an illustrated booklet and hair plastered with the meticulous exactitude required of men going into a Thames racing craft, where one hair more on one side or the other might sink the cranky shell and plunge them into the river. He is smart and polished and speckless as any prince with a valet at five hundred a year, and he brilliantined his rather fair and very rebellious locks until in the process of subduing they became many shades darker than their natural hue; yet he always saw clearly and maintained firmly that clothes should set off the man or woman and not be allowed to make use of the glorious human figure as a mere peg on which to display themselves, while hair should never advertise the coiffeur. So, though he has always examined himself before looking-glasses and had pots of all sorts of toilet things on his dressing-table, yet he has always been the manliest of the manly.
"Why shouldn't a boy look in the glass as well as a girl?" he said to me one day. "I don't see why it should only be the females that are allowed to take pleasure in whatever good things in the way of looks may happen to have been given them."
All his little personal ways came back to me as I moved about his room, making sure that nothing should be missing when he came. The back brush he had bought for the bath looked a little dusty, so I washed it. Even as I did this, snatches of poems which I would rather not have remembered just then kept on coming to my mind and my lips. There was a poem called "Aftermath" in The Times, which I shall never be able to forget. It begins:
"Yes ... he is gone ... there is the message ... see!
My son ... my eldest son. So be it, God!
This is no time for tears ... no time to mourn.
In the years to come,
When we have done our work, and God's own peace
With tranquil glory floods a troubled world,