A little cream silk coat and a pair of cream woollen gaiters reminded me of his first tryings to speak. His little stumbling words had always had a thought behind them. How he had taken us aback one morning when he had presented himself before us with a pen behind his ear, saying with an owl-like wiseness: "Fishman doos that." This referred to the fishmonger whom he visited every morning with his old nurse for the giving of orders. And then, another time, when I was annoyed with my brother and said to him that something he had done was: "Just the sort of thing that eccentric males always do," the room door had opened suddenly to admit a little figure in the cream silk pelisse and woollen gaiters, and a baby voice had cried reproachfully:
"He's beginning pretty early to stand up for his own sex," my brother said with a laugh that drove away the cloud of annoyance between us.
And yet the boy had in him that touch of the feminine which the best men have and which makes them irresistible. Already in his little way he had a knightly reverence for womanhood. Already his few pence of pocket money were spent on flowers for me.
I remember that what struck me most when he came into the room at this time was his brave little walk. He always had such brave, gay feet! I thought of this again last week when in answer to my question in a letter as to how his battalion had got all the way down from near Ypres to somewhere east of Abbeville, he said:
"We got a train for a bit of the way, but mostly we came on our feet."
Oh, the dear, dear feet, so plucky and untiring! And how I loved the "we" and the "our"! He always has identified himself with his men, so that they know that he cares for them, and they would follow him, as his colonel put it, "anywhere and into anything."
And that day in his small childhood the little feet had a charm that for an instant brought quick hot tears into my eyes.
He was very shy, though sometimes he could be very bold--as when one day, coming into the dining-room and finding a certain important person sitting there, he fetched on his own account a box of Vafiadis and, thrusting them under the visitor's eyes, said coolly:
At other times nothing could induce him to go into a room where there was someone who was a stranger to him.