Boy of My Heart

by Marie Connor Leighton

Mrs. Croy was a really darling creature of eighty-nine who dressed with a view to looking nineteen, and she had a high opinion of Little Yeogh Wough because, as she said, he was the only child living who had been nice to her.

The fact of the matter was, that she was a difficult person for a child to be "nice" to, for the reason that she apparently did her making-up without looking in the glass, and so was often to be found with an eyebrow coming down one side of her cheek and some rouge on her chin or on her forehead. Irreverent children had been accustomed to make remarks on these peculiarities, as also on the fact that the colour of her wig changed every day; but the boy of my heart, who liked her, would not have appeared to notice the matter if she had come before him without her head. And for this she was so grateful that she loved him passionately.

I loved her, too. It is astonishing how lovable women who make up badly usually are.

It was astonishing, too, how much Little Yeogh Wough loved women. He loved everybody and everything, for that matter, with a great and deep love and sympathy; such a love and sympathy as led him, for instance, to get out of his warm little bed one gloomy and bone-chilling morning of a London winter and labour for hours in the sodden garden to get into shelter some newly born puppies who were exposed to the icy rain. But most of all he loved women.

He loved them in a tender, caressing, worshipping way, and he loved everything connected with them; frocks, hats, dainty shoes and long suède gloves, beautiful furs and scents, and pots of powder and sweet-smelling soaps and creams. He could never understand how the ordinary boy did not care for these things. He liked to go out shopping with me more than almost anything else in the world, and he hated it when his regular day-school life prevented him from doing so.

"He won't be one of the men who are not interesting to talk to until they are thirty," I said to Miss Torry many a time as the months passed and I saw his character shaping itself. "If he goes on as he's doing now he'll be a most fascinating man with women, even in his early twenties."

"That's what I'm always telling people," replied my secretary. "And he'll be very manly with it. I can't understand how it is some people can't think a boy manly unless he's always stumping about in the thickest boots and talking about cricket and football."

"Oh, they're all manly!" I said. "But I always think the refined and clever ones are really the manliest and bravest. Just as it is always the people brought up in luxury that can live a rough life most successfully. A man came to me the other day and said he wanted to marry, but he didn't want to choose a lady because he was going out to Canada and he wanted to rough it; and I told him that he was making a mistake and that if he really wanted somebody who would do hard and even degrading work he must get a lady above all things, and that the more softly brought up she'd been the better she'd do the nastiest jobs. You can never get a servant to clean up after a dog, but you'll see duchesses doing it by the dozen at fashionable dog shows. And boys and men are like that. It isn't always the hulking footballer who will volunteer first to lead a forlorn hope."

The night on which, at the Paris hotel, I said Yes once more to Little Yeogh Wough's cry of: "Come and see me in bed, mother!" is a night which I shall never forget.