‘For tea!’ cried Janet with ever so many notes of admiration.
‘Oh, his people send him such whopping hampers,’ said Tom; ‘he could never get through it all if he didn’t have it for tea.’
‘Nasty meat!’ said little Janet with a grimace; ‘but the jam is very nice,’ she added with a sigh. ‘There’s no nursery when you’re gone. Mozer gives us very nice tea and plenty of cake; but she thinks I am better downstairs, not always with nurse.’
‘And do you think so? You were always a little——’
‘It’s nice when mozer talks to me and not to Beau,’ said Janet with reluctance. The grievance of the many times when the reverse was the case was implied, not put into words. ‘But when there is you and me it will be very nice,’ cried the little girl. ‘There is a plain little table in the corner not carved or anything. It has a cover on, but that comes off, and I am allowed to have it to paint pictures upon and play at anything you like. We’ll have it between us in the corner as if it was a little party,’ cried little Janet, ‘and they will never mind us, as long as we don’t make much noise.’
‘But I want to make a noise. I want to have a real square meal. It isn’t good for a fellow, when he’s growing, to be kept short of his grub. I want——’
‘Oh, Tom, what a horrible, horrible word!’
‘Much you know!’ cried the boy. ‘Fellows’ sisters all like it—to learn the same words as we say. But if you think I’m coming back from Hall’s, where they have all Eton rules, to sit as quiet as a mouse in the drawing-room, and have afternoon tea like an old fogey, I shan’t, and there’s an end of it,’ cried Tom.
Lady Car came in as he gave forth this determination in a loud voice. She came in very softly, as was her wont, with the soft trail of her satin gown on the soft mossy carpet, on which her light steps made no sound. In her eyes was still the dreamy smile of her pleasure in all the details and chronicles of a school-boy life, so elevated and ethereal, its dreams and its visions and its high purposes. She was imagining to herself a poem in which it might all be set forth in chapters or cantos. ‘The dawning genius’ would be the title of the first. She saw before her the spiritual being, all thought and enthusiasm, making a hundred chimeras divine—the boy-poet, the heir of all the ages, the fine flower of human promise. Half the adoring wife and half the woman of genius, she came in softly, with delicate charms of verses already sounding in her mind, and the scheme of the poem rising before her. Not like the Prelude: oh no; but the development, the dawn (a far more lovely word), the dawning of genius, of which in its time it might be her delightful mission to record the completion too.
She was roused from this vision by the noisy boyish voice. ‘I shan’t, and there’s an end of it,’ cried Tom, and she raised her dreamy eyes, startled to see the boy standing red in the face and defiant, his legs apart, his sturdy little square figure relieved against the window. How different from the ideal boy of whom she had been dreaming! the real boy, her son.