She always remembered how good the little thing had been as it lay in her arms, and how distasteful.  Those were always to remain its silent characteristics.  It was so good.  “As good,” the nurses used to say, “as if he were a little girl.”  It hardly ever cried, and when it did it curiously showed its difference from Richard.  He hated being a baby and subject to other people’s wills, and would lie in a cot and roar with resentment; but this child, when it felt a need that was not satisfied, did not rebel, but turned its face to the pillow and whined softly.  That was a strange and disquieting thing to watch.  She would stand in the shadow looking at the back of its little head, so repellently covered with hair that was like fluff off the floor, and listening to the cry that trailed from its lips like a dirty piece of string; and she would wonder why it did this, partly because she really wanted to know, and partly because it fended off the moment when she had to take it in her arms.  Perhaps, she reflected, it muted its rage because it knew that it was unlovable and must curry favour by not troubling people.  Indeed, it was as unlovable as a child could be.  It was not pleasant naked, for its bones looked at once fragile and coarse, and its flesh was lax, and in its clothes it was squalid, for it was always being sick or dribbling.  Then her heart reproached her, and she admitted that it cried softly because it had a gentle spirit, and she would move forward quickly and do what it desired, using, by an effort of will, those loving words that 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.