No, he had never disappointed me. And people as a rule are so disappointing! One's friends fall short, one's lover says the wrong thing at the wrong time, or forgets to say the right thing—which is even worse—and one's dearest clergymen and favourite actors and heroes generally make unspeakable fools of themselves just as one is getting ready to fall on one's knees and worship them.
All my life I have asked too much of people and then been left gaping at their unsatisfyingness. So it was no wonder that I was always frankly amazed whenever I stopped to realise that Little Yeogh Wough had always come up to my expectations.
Not that he was ever a prig. Heaven forbid! I would run farther from a prig than from a criminal. He has always had heaps of faults. But they are fine faults. One never rams one's head against a blank wall in him, but always finds deeps and deeps behind.
"That there Master Roland 'ave got so many nooks and corners in his mind that you can't never tell when you've got to the end of 'im," Old Nurse said once, mixing up her words, but showing her meaning plainly enough. "And what I says is, 'e'll go on getting deeper and deeper all his life, till 'e gets into the sincere and yellow leaf, as the Scriptures calls it."
Oh, how his room went on speaking to me of him! Sargent's picture of Carmencita, the Spanish dancer, is over the fireplace, with two fencing foils crossed above it; and above these again is a picture of two stately lovers walking by the shore in Brittany. The table near the foot of the bed had a pile of little military books upon it—"Quick Training for War" and its fellows—and dear little books of poems, and some sheets of his favourite green blotting-paper. He put himself out a good deal to get that green blotting-paper, saying that white showed the ink stains too much, while pink was an abomination, like a red flannel petticoat for a woman or a magenta pelisse for a pallid, blue-eyed child.
The dressing-table drawers were, and still are, full of things that he has no use for at the Front; all except the two small drawers on either side of the looking-glass, which have got a few old letters in them and a few odds and ends of nice things, such as solidified Eau de Cologne and the most deliciously fragrant shaving cream.
Shaving, indeed! Why, he has only done it for a year or so! I am sorry, by the way, that he has got a moustache now. Speaking for myself, I don't like a man with a moustache, except in the capacity of lover. Of course, I hate beards, anyhow. They always make me think of Abraham and Isaac and all those old uninteresting men whom no woman with any romance in her would look at twice, even if it were a case of him and of her being the sole survivors of the human race in the world. By the way, though, I did once see a beard which was attractive—or, more truthfully, was not unattractive. It was a short, silky, auburn beard, torpedo-shaped, and it was on a naval officer who was otherwise so charming that he might perhaps have carried off worse things than this with success. But, coming back to the moustache, it is a fit appendage for a man in the lover stage, because it gives an impression of masculinity. But when a man is my uncle or my father, or simply my friend, and above all, when he is likely to argue much with me, I prefer him to be clean shaven. It gives me a feeling of equality.
When I was a little girl I used to wonder why a man's words, however silly, always seemed to have more importance than a woman's words, however wise; and I satisfied myself that it was because a man's statements nearly always came from under a moustache. Even if he only said how fine the day was, the fact that the remark came from a mouth that had a black or brown or golden porch to it gave it a quite undue amount of weight. On the other hand, when I talk with men whose faces are as hairless as my own, I don't feel that they have any advantage over me. So, as I often have long discussions with Little Yeogh Wough, I felt quite sorry when he had to get a moustache.