He lacked that
solemn sense of relationship with which most children are imbued, and
the compulsory intimacy offended him, particularly when his aunt
referred to little boys generically as if they were beetles or mice. Her
inability to appreciate that he was Mark outraged his young sense of
personality which was further dishonoured by the manner in which she
spoke of herself as Aunt Helen, thus seeming to imply that he was only
human at all in so far as he was her nephew. She continually shocked his
dignity by prescribing medicine for him without regard to the presence
of servants or visitors; and nothing gave her more obvious pleasure than
to get Mark into the drawing-room on afternoons when dreary mothers of
pupils came to call, so that she might bully him under the appearance of
teaching good manners, and impress the parents with the advantages of a
Haverton House education.
As long as his mother remained alive, Mark tried to make her happy by
pretending that he enjoyed living at Haverton House, that he enjoyed his
uncle's Preparatory School for the Sons of Gentlemen, that he enjoyed
Slowbridge with its fogs and laburnums, its perambulators and
tradesmen's carts and noise of whistling trains; but a year after they
left Nancepean Mrs.
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