Now (to come back to the twins) on Corin's fourth birthday Mr. Wilkinson, moved by these considerations, had given him a wooden gun, and in doing so had committed a double error in Amory's eyes. His first mistake had been to suppose that even if, under the present lamentable (but nevertheless existing) conditions of militarism, Corin should ever become a soldier at all, he would be the uncommissioned bearer of a gun and not the commissioned bearer of a sword. And his second mistake had been like unto it, namely, to think that, in the case of a proletariat uprising say in Cardiff or York, Corin would not similarly have held some post of weight and responsibility on the other side. Corin shoot up through the street-trap of a coal-hole or pot somebody from behind a chimney-stack!... But Amory admitted that it must be difficult for Mr. Wilkinson to shake off the effects of his upbringing. That upbringing had been very different from, say, Mr. Brimby's. Mr. Brimby had been at Oxford, and in nobly stooping to help the oppressed brought as it were a fragrant whiff of graciousness and culture with him. Mr. Wilkinson was a nobody. He came from the stratum of need, and, when it came to fondling the twins, must not think himself a Brimby.... Therefore, Amory had had to ask him to take the gun back (a deprivation which had provoked a mighty outcry from Corin), and to give him, if he must give him something, a Nature book instead. Katie Deedes and Dickie Lemesurier were both permitted to fondle the twins, though in somewhat different measure. This difference of measure did not mean that either Katie or Dickie suffered from a chronic cold that the twins might have contracted. Here again the case was almost as complicated as the case of Mr. Wilkinson. Cases had a way of being complicated at The Witan. It was this:--