Young Ernest Henry Wilberforce, who had only yesterday achieved his
second birthday, watched, with a speculative eye, his nurse. He was
seated on the floor with his back to the high window that was flaming
now with the light of the dying sun; his nurse was by the fire, her
head, shadowed huge and fantastic on the wall, nodded and nodded and
nodded. Ernest Henry was, in figure, stocky and square, with a head
round, hard, and covered with yellow curls; rather light and cold blue
eyes and a chin of no mean degree were further possessions. He was
wearing a white blouse, a white skirt, white socks and shoes; his legs
were fat and bulged above his socks; his cold blue eyes never moved from
his nurse's broad back.

He knew that, in a very short time, disturbance would begin. He knew
that doors would open and shut, that there would be movement, strange
noises, then an attack upon himself, ultimately a removal of him to
another place, a stripping off him of his blouse, his skirt, his socks
and his shoes, a loathsome and strangely useless application of soap and
water--it was only, of course, in later years that he learned the names
of those abominable articles--and, finally, finally darkness. All this
he felt hovering very close at hand; one nod too many of his nurse's
head, and up she would start, off she would go, off _he_ would go.... He
watched her and stroked very softly his warm, fat calf.

It was a fine, spacious room that he inhabited. The ceiling--very, very
far away--was white and glimmering with shadowy spaces of gold flung by
the sun across the breast of it. The wallpaper was dark-red, and there
were many coloured pictures of ships and dogs and snowy Christmases, and
swans eating from the hands of beautiful little girls, and one garden
with roses and peacocks and a tumbling fountain. To Ernest Henry these
were simply splashes of colour, and colour, moreover, scarcely so