'Well, noblesse obliges you to go and have tea with her when she invites you. Wilks must be humoured. She is not so young as she was.'
'She must be a hundred.'
'Eighty-five.'
'Good heavens! And it seems only yesterday that she shut me up in a cupboard for stealing jam.'
'She was a great disciplinarian,' agreed George. 'You may find her a little on the autocratic side still. And I want to impress upon you, as her medical man, that you must not thwart her lightest whim. She will probably offer you boiled eggs and home-made cake. Eat them.'
'I will not eat boiled eggs at five o'clock in the afternoon,' said Frederick, with a strong man's menacing calm, 'for any woman on earth.'
'You will. And with relish. Her heart is weak. If you don't humour her, I won't answer for the consequences.'
'If I eat boiled eggs at five in the afternoon, I won't answer for the consequences. And why boiled eggs, dash it? I'm not a schoolboy.'
'To her you are. She looks on all of us as children still. Last Christmas she gave me a copy of Eric, or Little by Little.'
Frederick turned to the window, and scowled down upon the noxious and depressing scene below. Sparing neither age nor sex in his detestation, he regarded the old ladies reading their library novels on the seats with precisely the same dislike and contempt which he bestowed on the boys' school clattering past on its way to the bathing-houses.