Nicky stirred in his mother’s lap.  He raised his head.  And when he saw that queer look on his father’s face he smiled at it.  He had to make the smile himself, for it refused to come of its own accord.  He made it carefully, so that it shouldn’t hurt him.  But he made it so well that it hurt Frances and Anthony.

“I never saw a child bear pain as Nicky does,” Frances said in her pride.

“If he can bear it, I can’t,” said Anthony.  And he stalked into his dressing-room and shut the door on himself.

“Daddy minds more than you do,” said Frances.

At that Nicky sat up.  His eyes glittered and his cheeks burned with the fever of his earache.

“I don’t mind,” he said.  “Really and truly I don’t mind.  I don’t care if my ear does ache.

“It’s my eyes is crying, not me.”

* * * * *

At nine o’clock, when they were all sitting down to dinner, Nicky sent for his father and mother.  Something had happened.

Crackers, he said, had been going off in his ears, and they hurt most awfully.  And when it had done cracking his earache had gone away.  And Dorothy had brought him a trumpet from Rosalind’s party and Michael a tin train.  And Michael had given him the train and he wouldn’t take the trumpet instead.  Oughtn’t Michael to have had the trumpet?

And when they left him, tucked up in his cot in the night nursery, he called them back again.

“It was a jolly sell for me, wasn’t it?” said Nicky.  And he laughed.

IV

It seemed that Nicky would always be like that.  Whatever happened, and something was generally happening to him, he didn’t care.  When he scaled the plaster flower-pot on the terrace, and it gave way under his assault and threw him down the steps on to the gravel walk, he picked himself up, displaying a forehead that was a red abrasion filled in with yellow gravel and the grey dust of the smashed flower-pot, and said “I don’t care.  I liked it,” before anybody had time to pity him.  When Mary-Nanna stepped on his train and broke the tender, he said “It’s all right.  I don’t care.  I shall make another.”  It was no use Grannie saying, “Don’t care came to a bad end”; Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be life’s last challenge not to care.  No accident, however unforeseen, would ever take him at a disadvantage.

Two years passed and he was just the same.

Frances and Anthony agreed behind his back that Nicky was adorable.

But his peculiar attitude to misfortune became embarrassing when you had to punish him.  Nicky could break the back of any punishment by first admitting that it was a good idea and then thinking of a better one when it was too late.  It was a good idea not letting him have any cake for tea after he had tested the resilience of the new tyres on his father’s bicycle with a penknife; but, Nicky said, it would have been more to the purpose if they had taken his steam-engine from him for a week.