"Oh, yes, of course! You can show your love for beautiful things just as much at home as ever. That's the best side of you. But you must not talk about it to the boys, because they wouldn't understand. I'll show you what I mean by telling you of something that your father and I saw when we were in Paris last. We happened to go into a fashionable tea-shop, and there we saw, sitting with his mother, a boy who must have been eleven or twelve years old, in a white satin suit complete and with hair as long as a girl's hanging down his back, tied in with white satin ribbon. Now, you know, we English believe that a boy had better be dead than be like that. Even I think so. Of course, he was like a little prince in a fairy tale, but everyday life isn't a fairy tale, and we don't consider white satin and long hair manly. So it's in order to prevent anybody from thinking that you've got any taint of unmanliness about you that you must make up your mind now to give up pretty things for yourself and go in for boyish plainness, and cricket and football. No one must ever think you soft and flabby."
"I don't think anybody will ever do that," he laughed again. "I knocked one of the boys down to-day for being impudent to me. He was a good deal bigger than I am; so it's done me a lot of good with the others."
I took one of his small, strong hands and clasped it in mine and held it against my breast.
"Was this the little hand that did it?" I laughed. "Because, if so, that is splendid. Those boys must have seen that golden curls and big soft brown eyes can have a good deal of manly strength behind them; and people will always respect your brains, and even your longings for the pretty things of life, as long as they know you're strong enough to knock them down if you want to. But you must only use your strength against others who are just as strong. You must never use it against your little sister and brother. Nurse says you have been behaving badly in the nursery this evening—interfering with the others instead of doing your home-work. Why haven't you done your preparation?"
"Why, because the master that's got to see my home-work won't be at school to-morrow, so it would have been all a waste. The other boys said they weren't going to do theirs."
"And what difference does it make to you whether they do theirs or not? How does it alter your duty? Why should you cheat yourself because they are silly enough to cheat themselves?"
The big brown eyes looked at me blankly. I went on:
"Don't you see, Little Yeogh Wough, that it's only yourself that you cheat when you don't do your work? It's not your master. It doesn't matter to him. He doesn't lose anything. It's you who lose. You've cheated yourself this evening of something that you might have had. And you haven't been thorough. If you neglect your work often like this, you'll get to slurring it over when you do it, so long as you think nobody will notice the slurring; and that won't do. That will make you grow up just like most of the other men you see around you, and not the great, strong, wonderful man that I want you to be."
He patted my face and neck with the hand that I had left free, as I knelt by the bedside.