cry again?

Lucy was not a bit like the Sugar-Bread child. She had fair hair, it is
true, and it was plaited in two braids, but they were very long and
straight; she herself was long and lean and had a freckled face and
bright, jolly eyes.

'I'm so glad you've come,' she said, meeting him on the steps of the
most beautiful house he had ever seen; 'we can play all sort of things
now that you can't play when you're only one. I'm an only child,' she
added, with a sort of melancholy pride. Then she laughed. '"Only" rhymes
with "lonely," doesn't it?' she said.

'I don't know,' said Philip, with deliberate falseness, for he knew
quite well.

He said no more.

Lucy tried two or three other beginnings of conversation, but Philip
contradicted everything she said.

'I'm afraid he's very very stupid,' she said to her nurse, an extremely
trained nurse, who firmly agreed with her. And when her aunt came to see
her next day, Lucy said that the little new boy was stupid, and
disagreeable as well as stupid, and Philip confirmed this opinion of his
behaviour to such a degree that the aunt, who was young and
affectionate, had Lucy's clothes packed at once and carried her off for
a few days' visit.

So Philip and the nurse were left at the Grange. There was nobody else
in the house but servants. And now Philip began to know what loneliness
meant. The letters and the picture post-cards which his sister sent
every day from the odd towns on the continent of Europe, which she
visited on her honeymoon, did not cheer the boy. They merely
exasperated him, reminding him of the time when she was all his own, and
was too near to him to need to send him post-cards and letters.

The extremely trained nurse, who wore a grey uniform and white cap and
apron, disapproved of Philip to the depths of her well-disciplined
nature. 'Cantankerous little pig,' she called him to herself.

To the housekeeper she said, 'He is an unusually difficult and
disagreeable child. I should imagine that his education has been much
neglected. He wants a tight hand.'

She did not use a tight hand to him, however. She treated him with an
indifference more annoying than tyranny. He had immense liberty of a
desolate, empty sort. The great house was his to go to and fro in. But
he was not allowed to touch anything in it. The garden was his--to
wander through, but he must not pluck flowers or fruit. He had no
lessons, it is true; but, then, he had no games either. Ther