Meanwhile, upstairs in the nursery there were children of all ages, and two nurses did their best to grapple with them.  The nurses came and went, and always, after the first day or two, the new nurse would give in to the conditions, and would lead, at first with amusement and a rather excited sense of adventure, afterwards with a growing feeling of dirt and discomfort, a tangled and helter-skelter existence.  Some of the children were now at school, but Lucy, a girl ten years of age, was a supercilious child who rebelled against the conditions of her life, but was too idle and superior to attempt any alteration of them.  After her there were Roger, Dorothy, and Robert.  Then came Bim, four years of age a fortnight ago, and, last of all, Timothy, an infant of nine months.  With the exception of Lucy and Bim they were exceedingly noisy children.  Lucy should have passed her days in the schoolroom under the care of Miss Agg, a melancholy and hope-abandoned spinster, and, during lesson hours, there indeed she was.  But in the schoolroom she had no one to impress with her amazing wisdom and dignity.  “Poor mummy,” as she always thought of her mother, was quite unaware of her habits or movements, and Miss Agg was unable to restrain either the one or the other, so Lucy spent most of her time in the nursery, where she sat, calm and collected, in the midst of confusion that could have “given old Babel points and won easy.”  She was reverenced by all the younger children for her sedate security, but by none of them so surely and so magnificently as Bim.  Bim, because he was quieter than the other children, claimed for his opinions and movements the stronger interest.

His nurses called him “deep,” “although for a deep child I must say he’s ’appy.”

Both his depth and his happiness were at Lucy’s complete disposal.  The people who saw him in the Square called him “a jolly little boy,” and, indeed, his appearance of gravity was undermined by the curl of his upper lip and a dimple in the middle of his left cheek, so that he seemed to be always at the crisis of a prolonged chuckle.  One very rarely heard him laugh out loud, and his sturdy, rather fat body was carried rather gravely, and he walked contemplatively as though he were thinking something out.  He would look at you, too, very earnestly when you spoke to him, and would wait a little before he answered you, and then would speak slowly as though he were choosing his words with care.  And yet he was, in spite of these things, really a “jolly little boy.”  His “jolliness” was there in point of view, in the astounding interest he found in anything and everything, in his refusal to be upset by any sort of thing whatever.