lic of elderly ladies who were useful
for helping in clerical displays, but were otherwise non-existent. Then
she hated children, so that she really often wondered why she continued
to live with her brother-in-law, but it was cheap, comfortable and
safe, and although she assured herself and everyone else that there were
countless homes wildly eager to receive her, it was perhaps just as well
not to put their eagerness too abruptly to the test.

There had been war between her and Jeremy since Jeremy's birth, but
it had been war of a rather mild and inoffensive character, consisting
largely in Jeremy on his side putting out his tongue at her when she
could not see him, and she on her side sending him to wash his ears when
they really did not require to be washed. She had felt always in Jeremy
an obstinate dislike of her, and as he had seemed to her neither a very
clever nor intelligent child she had consoled herself very easily with
the thought that he did not like her simply because he was stupid. So
it had been until this year, and then suddenly they had been flung into
sharper opposition. It was hard to say what had brought this about,
but it was perhaps that Jeremy had sprung suddenly from the unconscious
indifference of a young child into the active participation of a growing
boy. Whatever the truth might have been, the coming of Hamlet had drawn
their attitudes into positive conflict.

Aunt Amy had felt from the first that Hamlet laughed at her. Had you
asked her to state, as a part of her general experience, that she really
believed that dogs could laugh at human beings she would indignantly
have repudiated any idea so fantastic, nevertheless, unanalysed and
unconfronted, that was her conviction. The dog laughed at her, he
insulted her by walking into her bedroom with his muddy feet and then
pretending that he hadn't known that it was her bedroom, regarding her
through his hair with an ironical and malicious glance, barking suddenly
when she made some statement as though he enjoyed immensely an excellent
joke, but, above all, despising her, she felt, so that the wall of
illusion that she had built around herself had been pulled down by at
least one creature, more human, she knew, in spite of herself, than many
human beings. Therefore, she hated Hamlet, and scarcely a day passed
that she did not try to have him flung from the house, or at least kept
in the kitchen offices.

Hamlet had, however, won the hearts of t