Look at him now, for instance; a cripple for life, and pretending to
see nothing in it but a joke, and expressing as much admiration for
his horrible wooden leg as though it had been a king's sceptre! In
Aunt Charlotte's view, Austin ought to have pitied himself immensely,
and expressed a hope that God would help him to bear his burden with
orthodox resignation to the Divine will; instead of which, he seemed
totally unconscious of having any burden at all--a state of mind that
was nothing less than impious. Austin was now seventeen, and it was
high time that he took more serious views of life. Ever since he was a
baby he had been her special charge; for his mother had died in giving
him birth, and his father had followed her about a twelvemonth later.
She had always done her duty to the boy, and loved him as though he
had been her own; but she reminded onlookers rather of a conscientious
elderly cat with limited views of natural history condemned by
circumstances to take care of a very irresponsible young eaglet. The
eaglet, on his side, was entirely devoted to his protectress, but it
was impossible for him not to feel a certain lenient and amused
contempt for her very limited horizon.

"Auntie," he said to her one day, "you're just like a frog at the
bottom of a well. You think the speck of blue you see above you is the
entire sky, and the water you paddle up and down in is the ocean. Why
can't you take a rather more cosmic view of things?"

This extraordinary remark occurred in the course of a wrangle between
the two, because Austin insisted on his pet cat--a plump, white,
matronly creature he had christened 'Gioconda,' because (so _he_ said)
she always smiled so sweetly--sitting up at the dinner-table and being
fed with tit-bits off his own fork; and Aunt Charlotte objected to
this proceeding on the ground that the proper place for cats was in