COSMO. ‘Oh--well!--and then taking both hands and saying ‘Dear fellow’--‘It’s gone out, you know.’ The Colonel chuckles and forbears. ‘I’m uncommon glad you told me, Cosmo. Not having been a father for so long, you see, I’m rather raw at it.’ COSMO, relieved, ‘That’s all right. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’ COLONEL. ‘If you could give me any other tips?’ COSMO, becoming confidential, ‘Well, there’s my beastly name. Of course you didn’t mean any harm when you christened me Cosmo, but--I always sign myself “C. Grey”--to make the fellows think I’m Charles.’ COLONEL. ‘Do they call you that?’ COSMO. ‘Lord, no, they call me Grey.’ COLONEL. ‘And do you want me to call you Grey?’ COSMO, magnanimously, ‘No, I don’t expect that. But I thought that before people, you know, you needn’t call me anything. If you want to attract my attention you could just say “Hst!”--like that.’ COLONEL. ‘Right you are. But you won’t make your mother call you Hst.’ COSMO, sagaciously, ‘Oh no--of course women are different.’ COLONEL. ‘You’ll be very nice to her, Cosmo? She had to pinch and save more than I should have allowed--to be able to send you into the navy. We are poor people, you know.’ COSMO. ‘I’ve been planning how to be nice to her.’ COLONEL. ‘Good lad. Good lad.’ Cosmo remembers his conversation with Amy, and thoughtfully hides the ‘yellow flowers’ behind a photograph. This may be called one of his plans for being nice to mother. COSMO. ‘You don’t have your medals here, father?’ COLONEL. ‘No, I don’t carry them about. But your mother does, the goose. They are not very grand ones, Cosmo.’ COSMO, true blue, ‘Yes, they are.’ An awkward silence falls. The Colonel has so much to say that he can only look it. He looks it so eloquently that Cosmo’s fears return. He summons the plan to his help. ‘I wonder what is in the evening papers. If you don’t mind, I’ll cut out and get one.’ Before he can cut out, however, Alice is in the room, the picture of distress. No wonder, for even we can hear the baby howling. ALICE, tragically, ‘My baby. Robert, listen; that is how I affect her.’ Cosmo cowers unseen. COLONEL. ‘No, no, darling, it isn’t you who have made her cry. She--she is teething. It’s her teeth, isn’t it?’ he barks at the nurse, who emerges looking not altogether woeful. ‘Say it’s her teeth, woman.’ NURSE, taking this as a reflection on her charge. ‘She had her teeth long ago.’ ALICE, the forlorn, ‘The better to bite me with.’ NURSE, complacently, ‘I don’t understand it. She is usually the best-tempered lamb--as you may see for yourself, sir.’ It is an imitation that the Colonel is eager to accept, but after one step toward the nursery he is true to Alice. COLONEL. ‘I _decline_ to see her. I refuse to have anything to do with her till she comes to a more reasonable frame of mind.’ The nurse retires, to convey possibly this ultimatum to her charge.