It was a joyous occasion for Little Yeogh Wough when he lay in his bed again for his good-night talk with me, and not in a berth.
"It's nice to come home and be welcomed by the children and the dogs. What a pity it is that dogs can't welcome us when we go to Heaven! I've been thinking this ever since Miss Torry told me that Tita didn't eat anything for four days after we'd gone and was so cross with her puppies that she gave them smacks with her paw every time they came near her—all because her heart was breaking. And just because she's got four legs and fur instead of two legs and a bare skin she isn't supposed to have a soul."
His eyes were looking full into mine as our faces rested against the pillow, close to each other.
I had returned to the house an hour in front of him and I knew in what a wonderful way the place seemed to get richer directly he appeared inside its walls. Everything took on a new value the moment he got near it. It is a fine thing not to be an impoverisher, but it is a finer thing still to be an enricher. It is a particularly valuable quality to young people starting in life on small incomes. He himself knew it when he saw it in others.
"I say, Big Yeogh Wough, how is it that you always look quite expensively dressed in hats and coats that most people would throw away if they saw them off you?" he asked me one day.
"I don't know, dear. I only know that there are people like that, while there are other people who could walk through the East End on a Bank Holiday in a fifty-guinea musical-comedy hat without having a single person look at them twice. It hasn't anything to do with handsomeness. Some really beautiful people aren't worth looking at. It has to do with style. When you grow up you'll never need to envy a field-marshal his uniform. Just by being yourself you'll have a uniform more dazzling than any that was ever worn in Europe."
"Is that why you never envy women who can buy their clothes in Paris?"
"I'm too conceited to envy them," I answered him. "A woman who envies other women their things can't think very much of herself. Now, I think so much of myself that if I choose to go out with a hole in my stocking, then holes in stockings are the fashion. You must feel like that, too—within limits. Only, of course, a well-bred man always needs to be smarter than a well-bred woman. By the way, I met one of the great French man-dressmakers at a luncheon at the Mansion House one day and he taught me a lot of wisdom. It all came to this—that you can't dress the undressable person and that the dressable person doesn't need dressing. He said that the struggle to dress royal women and millionaires' wives who were not dressable had turned his hair prematurely grey."
"I suppose it comes to this, too—that we must cultivate ourselves and trust to luck for the rest?"