meaning to her intellect.  Look at him now, for instance; a cripple for life, and pretending to see nothing in it but a joke, and expressing as much admiration for his horrible wooden leg as though it had been a king’s sceptre!  In Aunt Charlotte’s view, Austin ought to have pitied himself immensely, and expressed a hope that God would help him to bear his burden with orthodox resignation to the Divine will; instead of which, he seemed totally unconscious of having any burden at all—­a state of mind that was nothing less than impious.  Austin was now seventeen, and it was high time that he took more serious views of life.  Ever since he was a baby he had been her special charge; for his mother had died in giving him birth, and his father had followed her about a twelvemonth later.  She had always done her duty to the boy, and loved him as though he had been her own; but she reminded onlookers rather of a conscientious elderly cat with limited views of natural history condemned by circumstances to take care of a very irresponsible young eaglet.  The eaglet, on his side, was entirely devoted to his protectress, but it was impossible for him not to feel a certain lenient and amused contempt for her very limited horizon.

“Auntie,” he said to her one day, “you’re just like a frog at the bottom of a well.  You think the speck of blue you see above you is the entire sky, and the water you paddle up and down in is the ocean.  Why can’t you take a rather more cosmic view of things?”

This extraordinary remark occurred in the course of a wrangle between the two, because Austin insisted on his pet cat—­a plump, white, matronly creature he had christened ‘Gioconda,’ because (so he said) she always smiled so sweetly—­sitting up at the dinner-table and being fed with tit-bits off his own fork; and Aunt Charlotte objected to this proceeding on the ground that the proper place for cats was in the kitchen.  Austin, on his side, averred that cats were in many ways much superior to human beings; that they had been worshipped as gods by the philosophical Egyptians because they were so scornful and mysterious; and that Gioconda herself was not only the divinest cat alive, but entitled to respect, if only as an embodiment and representative of cat-hood in the abstract, which was a most important element in the economy of the universe.  It was when Aunt Charlotte stigmatised these philosophical reflections as a pack of impertinent twaddle that Austin had had the audacity to say that she was like a frog.

And now her eaglet had been maimed for life, and whatever he might feel about it himself her own responsibilities were certainly much increased.  At this very moment, for instance, after having practised stumping about the room for half-an-hour he insisted on going downstairs.  Of course the idea was ridiculous.  Even the doctor shook his head, while old Martha, who had tubbed Austin when he was two years old, joined in the general protest.