Mr Mulliner winced slightly, as if the old wound still troubled him.
'It is curious,' he went on, after a thoughtful pause, 'how little change the years bring about in the attitude of a real, genuine, crusted old family nurse towards one who in the early knickerbocker stage of his career has been a charge of hers. He may grow grey or bald and be looked up to by the rest of his world as a warm performer on the Stock Exchange or a devil of a fellow in the sphere of Politics or the Arts, but to his old Nanna he will still be the Master James or Master Percival who had to be hounded by threats to keep his face clean. Shakespeare would have cringed before his old nurse. So would Herbert Spencer, Attila the Hun, and the Emperor Nero. My nephew Frederick ... but I must not bore you with my family gossip.'
We reassured him.
'Oh well, if you wish to hear the story. There is nothing much in it as a story, but it bears out the truth of what I have just been saying.'
I will begin (said Mr Mulliner) at the moment when Frederick, having come down from London in response to an urgent summons from his brother, Dr George Mulliner, stood in the latter's consulting-room, looking out upon the Esplanade of that quiet little watering-place, Bingley-on-Sea.
George's consulting-room, facing west, had the advantage of getting the afternoon sun: and this afternoon it needed all the sun it could get, to counteract Frederick's extraordinary gloom. The young man's expression, as he confronted his brother, was that which a miasmic pool in some dismal swamp in the Bad Lands might have worn if it had had a face.
'Then the position, as I see it,' he said in a low, toneless voice, 'is this. On the pretext of wishing to discuss urgent business with me, you have dragged me down to this foul spot—seventy miles by rail in a compartment containing three distinct infants sucking sweets—merely to have tea with a nurse whom I have disliked since I was a child.'
'You have contributed to her support for many years,' George reminded him.
'Naturally, when the family were clubbing together to pension off the old blister, I chipped in with my little bit,' said Frederick. 'Noblesse oblige.'