It has always been a mystery to me why I am supposed to have spoiled Little Yeogh Wough. My hand was always over him, invisibly keeping him down. He had more punishments than the others had. But he had a charm that took the sternness out of discipline and a wonderful knack of knowing the right thing to say, and when to say it. And he knew how to give way with a quite princely grace.
"Roland," I said to him one day, rejoining him in the car in which he had been waiting for me outside a house where I had been paying a formal call. "I have just heard someone say a very silly thing. She—it was a woman—said how much more right and proper it would be if the words under the Prince of Wales's feathers were: 'I rule,' instead of 'I serve.' You can see the silliness of that, can't you?"
He nodded. "You told me one day that 'I serve' is much grander."
"Of course it is. Any empty-headed cock on a dirt heap can crow out 'I rule,' and it doesn't mean anything much; but it takes a great man to say 'I serve,' and when a great man does say it you feel that he's a king. You know, Little Yeogh Wough, empty show doesn't mean much. We're very fond of beautiful things, you and I, but——"
"Oh, yes!" he put in. "That's why I asked you to let me come with you to-day, because it was the first time you were wearing your new hat."
"Yes. Beautiful things are very nice indeed, but they don't mean much. You don't remember, do you, when we took you to the South of France and we saw Queen Victoria arrive at Nice? We were in a crowd of French people and they were talking about the Queen and saying what a mighty woman she was—Empress of India, and all the rest of it. And then she came—a little figure in a plain, ugly black dress, and with what you would have called a plain, ugly old black bonnet on. She wasn't helped by her clothes a bit; and yet there was something about her that was so great and so masterful that a hush went through that French crowd, and I knew that every man and woman in it felt what I felt myself—that here was a human creature so truly queenly and so truly grand, that laces and furs and jewels would have spoiled her."
I saw the big brown eyes that were fronting mine suddenly soften and glow.
"I like a queen better than a king," he said now. "I should like to fight for you if you were a queen."