nurse “Da,” who wore the violet dress on Sundays, and enjoyed the name of Spraggins in that private life lived at oddmoments even by domestic servants. His mother had only appeared to him, as it were in dreams, smelling delicious, smoothinghis forehead just before he fell asleep, and sometimes docking his hair, of a golden brown colour. When he cut his head openagainst the nursery fender she was there to be bled over; and when he had nightmare she would sit on his bed and cuddle hishead against her neck. She was precious but remote, because “Da” was so near, and there is hardly room for more than onewoman at a time in a man’s heart. With his father, too, of course, he had special bonds of union; for little Jon also meantto be a painter when he grew up — with the one small difference, that his father painted pictures, and little Jon intendedto paint ceilings and walls, standing on a board between two step-ladders, in a dirty-white apron, and a lovely smell ofwhitewash. His father also took him riding in Richmond Park, on his pony, Mouse, so-called because it was so-coloured.

Little Jon had been born with a silver spoon in a mouth which was rather curly and large. He had never heard his fatheror his mother speak in an angry voice, either to each other, himself, or anybody else; the groom, Bob, Cook, Jane, Bella andthe other servants, even “Da,” who alone restrained him in his courses, had special voices when they talked to him. He wastherefore of opinion that the world was a place of perfect and perpetual gentility and freedom.

A child of 1901, he had come to consciousness when his country, just over that bad attack of scarlet fever, the Boer War,was preparing for the Liberal revival of 1906. Coercion was unpopular, parents had exalted notions of giving their offspringa good time. They spoiled their rods, spared their children, and anticipated the results with enthusiasm. In choosing,moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of