"Rather bright. And in any case she is a girl and you are bound to honour girls and women all the days of your life. A sister should be a very holy and lovely thing to a brother, Little Yeogh Wough, as you will know some day."
Now that he has grown big and is a soldier, he has in very deed come to know this, as is shown by something he said in a letter which he sent to his sister from the Front only a few days ago:
"My dear Bystander,
"I wonder what makes you a Bystander?
"I don't know; but I do know that I haven't got the stuff in me of which Bystanders are made. I must be the Principal Player or nothing. I know, too, that a Bystander knows more and understands more than a Principal Player. I often think that if anyone wanted a concise description of myself I should do better to send them to you than to anyone else. It is no longer a case of 'dear little sister and baby brother,' as it used to be once when I said my prayers; but for a boy the milestones are whiter and more evident than for a girl. The Public School and Osborne and Oxford are landmarks which you have nothing equivalent to set against.
"And yet this big brother ... autocratic, meteoric, inconsiderate ... who writes to you often as if you were the Stores, sees more and knows more and thinks more than even Bystanders give him credit for. The three years between us were once a very great deal of difference, but that time has passed. Let it rather be, as I once wrote on a photograph for you, Frater sorori; amicus amico. Someone remarked to me the other day: 'All your family are such dears ... all of them.'
"Yes."
Looking back again, I remember that it was in the time of the coming out of the almond blossom that Little Yeogh Wough tried for a scholarship at Winchester and failed, as he had known beforehand that he would fail, because never once in his life had he succeeded in getting anything at the first time of trying for it. And it was not very long afterwards that he came out triumphantly in an even harder examination and so won his way into another great Public School.
He signalised his triumph by asking that evening with quite unusual boldness and assurance: "Father, can I have the first hot water in the bath?"
And his father, who usually defended that first hot water as a tigress defends her cubs, answered him with almost boisterous goodwill:
"Certainly, my boy, certainly. Tell the cook to pile on the coal and make it hotter than ever." And this was the dear, delightful man who, if he saw a light in the bathroom window when he was coming home in the evening, would take to running along the street like a creature possessed, and if asked what was the matter, would reply distractedly as he ran:
"Somebody's in the bathroom! Somebody's having a bath ... taking all the hot water! I must get home and stop it. I must get home and stop it."