"Extravagances! 'E've got no more idea of money than that there dog have."
She nodded towards the black Skye terrier. And I laughed to myself as I thought how true had been an opinion passed on him by his sharp little sister when she had said, a few days earlier:
"If I had to depend on either of my brothers, I would rather it were Evelyn. He would only take a very tiny cottage for me to live in, but he would pay for it always; whereas Roland would find me a palace, saying nothing else was good enough for me, and then would forget to give me any money to keep it up."
That was Little Yeogh Wough all over.
We did not always talk at the times when I went in to see him in bed. Sometimes we stayed quite quiet all the time that I was there, having only our hands clasped. Sometimes we sang songs together, English and French, very softly, so that people passing on the landing outside might not think us lunatics. He, who was often so shy with others, was as free from self-consciousness with me as if he had been alone. I had taught him to be so, ever since he was two years old. The wonderful chord of love and sympathy between us was so strong that in these precious half-hours at the end of the day he could not feel any constraint with me, but only a double freedom.
Once we were even so childish as to try who could do the better cat-calling. But whether we talked or sang or cat-called, we got to love each other more with every moment that we passed there in the darkness, he in the bed with his big lion-cub head on the pillow and I kneeling beside it, with my face close to his.
Whenever he came back from school it was with honours. He was learning, growing, developing in every way. He was learning to govern himself and through this to govern others. And to this end, and this end only, he had become a good cricketer and footballer.
"You see, Big Yeogh Wough, I had to do it," he explained. "Boys at a public school don't respect brains unless the boy that's got the brains is good at games. That's why a letter was written to you asking you to encourage me to put my heart in cricket and football."
"Well, I did encourage you," I laughed. "For, though I can't endure the man who's a cricketer or football player and nothing more, yet, on the other hand, I don't like the man who can't play games at all. There's always something wrong about him, as there is about a man who never smokes. Cricket and football are manure for the character just as Greek and Latin are manure for the mind. Only one doesn't want all manure and nothing else."
When I went away from him and left him to go to sleep I always felt as if a piece of living radium had had its activities turned off for a few hours. And then, night after night, my superstition would get hold of me and my strong belief in the law of Compensation would make me ask myself the question over and over again: