And I had been out buying pretty clothes in order the better to live up to this boy's ideal of me! I found him sitting in the dining-room, waiting for his tea, which he always had with us. "Roland, is it true that you have been upstairs and knocked your sister down and trampled upon her?" "Yes, mother, it's quite true." His eyes met mine unflinchingly. "And you have done this unmanly thing ... you, my boy, that I worship so much!" "Yes." He answered me very low, but very steadily. "She made me angry because she hadn't got any imagination. I asked her to imagine the nursery door was red and she said she couldn't because it was white. That made me so angry that I couldn't help knocking her down." "You little coward!" I said to him very quietly. "You little coward!" I saw his eyes flinch then and fill with tears and his face grow first very red and then deadly white, while his mouth began to quiver and twitch. And I went out in search of a cane. That was the last whipping he ever had; and the last occasion on which he could ever be accused of acting unchivalrously towards any feminine person. "Little Yeogh Wough, why do you do these things and lower my grand ideas of you?" I asked him when I went to see him in bed the next night. "And, apart from that, why do you put it into the power of Old Nurse and other people to say that I am a fool for worshipping you as I do? You are not kind to me when you do that. You see, I know in spite of everything that you are good and great; but they don't know because they are blind, and so they think me wrong and believe you to be a brutal little coward. Why do you give them the chance?" "It's Clare. She aggravates me. She precipitates." "Precipitates?" I looked at him wonderingly. "Yes. She always rushes headlong at the wrong thing. Yesterday afternoon I was beginning to tell Nurse that there was something wrong with my eiderdown, and I'd just got out the first syllable ei when Clare broke in: 'Oh, yes, Roland, I knew there was something wrong with your eye. I saw it directly you came in.' That was what began to get my temper up. Then I said something sharp to her and she answered me back. She said that when she grew up she'd take a cottage on Dartmoor to receive me in when I came out of the convict prison. What do you think of that for a girl of eleven?" "Rather bright. And in any case she is a girl and you are bound to honour girls and women all the days of your life. A sister should be a very holy and lovely thing to a brother, Little Yeogh Wough, as you will know some day." Now that he has grown big and is a soldier, he has in very deed come to know this, as is shown by something he said in a letter which he sent to his sister from the Front only a few days ago: "MY DEAR BYSTANDER, "I wonder what makes you a Bystander?