"That comes of doin' things by 'alves with Master Roland's 'air," Old Nurse had ventured to air her opinions. "What I do say is, if you've got to cut a boy's curls off, why, you'd better cut 'em off, and not 'ave bits of 'em left 'anging. Of course, it's a shame, but boys 'as got to be boys, and you can't 'ave 'em goin' to school lookin' like them little Cupids in the pictures."
"It's true that an aureole of golden curls doesn't look very well coming out from under a bowler hat," I said to myself. Have you ever noticed that there's hardly one grown-up man in a hundred that can ever look decent in a bowler? A man has either to be very neat-featured or else very ugly to carry off that sort of hat.
"Them there bowlers is all the go for little boys of Master Roland's age, and 'is suits 'im right enough, only 'e chooses to think as it don't, and you listens to 'im," went on the worthy old woman. "'Pon my word, that there boy's vanity do beat anything I ever come across in all my life. Every time that I makes 'im put that bowler on, 'e gets into such a temper as you never saw. 'E thinks as people laughs at 'im for it, but if they does laugh, it's at 'is fatness, not at his 'at."
"That's because all the rest of them are such skeletons," I rejoined. "Any boy with any flesh on his bones at all would look fat compared with them. People are so silly about thinness and fatness. They always think of what they look like dressed, and never of what they look like undressed. Why, half the women who go about with a reputation for slimness and elegance would give one a start if one saw their blade bones uncovered! And it's the same with children."
"That may be, ma'am, but it don't do away with the fact that these children is all so enormous that people opens their eyes wide whenever they sees 'em a-comin'. As for Master Roland, I've given 'im up. 'E 'ad the coolness to say to me to-day as my 'air was going greyer. I told 'im that at my time of life people 'as either to 'ave their 'air go grey or else come off, and they aren't given their choice."
"I suppose you'd rather have your hair absent and black than present and grey," I answered her without thinking what I was saying.
"Little Yeogh Wough, you're a very small child still; but I think you'll understand me when I tell you that you've got to a time in your life when you'll have to be very careful about holding on to beauty," I said to the Boy that night when I went in to see him and to have the talk which was as regular as the coming of the night itself. "A girl can keep her ideas of beauty always, but a boy is supposed to drop his when he begins going to school. It's not only the cutting off of yellow curls that I'm thinking of, but other things, too. You'll have to hide your great love for flowers and colour and poetry."
He looked puzzled.
"Mustn't I bring you flowers any more, Big Yeogh Wough?" he laughed then.