t
fluttered to her lips when she was tending Richard. Time went on, but
her attitude to it never developed beyond this alternate recognition of
its hatefulness and its goodness.

She had called it Roger after her own father in a desperate effort to
bring it into the family, but the name, when she spoke it, seemed
infinitely remote, as if she were speaking of the child of some servant
in the house whom she had heard of but had never seen. When he was out
of her sight, she ejected the thought of him from her mind, so that when
her eyes fell on him again it was a shock. He did not become more seemly
to look at. Indeed, he was worse when he grew out of frocks, for
knickerbockers disclosed that he had very thin legs and large, knotty
knees. He had a dull stare, and there seemed always to be a ring of food
round his mouth. He had no pride. When she took the children on a
railway journey Richard would sit quite still in his seat and would
speak in a very low voice, and if any of the other passengers offered
him chocolates or sweets he would draw back his chin as an animal does
when it is offered food, and would shake his head very gravely. But
Roger would move about, falling over people's legs, and would talk
perpetually in a voice that was given a whistling sound by air that
passed through the gap between his two front teeth, and when he got
tired he would whine. He was unexclusive and unadventurous. He liked
playing on the sands at Prittlebay in summer when they were covered with
trippers' children. He hated Richard's passion for bringing the names of
foreign places into the games. When Richard was sitting on his engine
and roaring, "I'm the Trans-Andean express, and I don't half go at a
pace!" Roger would stand against the wall opposite and cry over and over
again in that whistling voice: "Make it the London, Tilbury and
Prittlebay train! Make it the London, Tilbury and Prittlebay train!"
When he felt happy he would repeatedly jump up in the air, bringing both
his feet down on the ground at once, but a little distance apart, so
that his thin legs looked horrible, and he would make loud, silly
noises. At these times Richard would sit with his back to him and would
take no notice. Always he was insolent to the other child. He would not
share his toys with him, though sometimes he would pick out one of the
best toys and give it to his brother as a master might give a present to
a servant. He was of the substance of his mother,