He detested Golder’s Green. The house seemed so small and pokey, and the garden so prim, after the great rooms in India and Uncle Gerald’s kindly, wandering old house and big friendly garden. The trim roads and jumbled, pretty little houses weighed upon him with a deadly weight of depression, though he couldn’t have told why. There were no dogs either, only a large aloof cat called "Ra," that Aunt Hildegarde used to enthrone on a cushion, placed on a kind of pillar, while she and visiting ladies, attired in straight, sad-coloured garments, sandals, and digitated socks, sat round about upon the floor and enthused upon his wondrous beauty and wisdom. Ronnie would have liked Ra, if he might have stroked and cuddled him, but the children were not allowed to touch him, as he was supposed to be fierce and resentful of such attentions. Ronnie was always in trouble, always doing or, even more often, saying what he ought not. Seeing ladies who wore veils on their heads, and had bare feet and sandals, he asked if they were ayahs; on being told hastily "of course not," he suggested that they were Parsi ladies, and was severely snubbed in consequence. He was slow and clumsy over the little handicrafts his cousins practised with such skill and industry, and when Cedric and Githa irritated him beyond bearing he tried to beat them, which caused a frightful commotion and filled the whole household with consternation. His aunt and uncle were not like Uncle Gerald in the matter of answering questions. To be sure, they told him all sorts of things he didn’t particularly want to know, or knew already; but they refused to answer questions. They held his cousins up to him as models, a fatal thing to do, and they made no allowance for a lonely little boy suddenly transported to an entirely new environment. They were cold, too, sniffy and uninterested in all he had to say about Uncle Gerald, and this he resented extremely. He could not know that they were a centre of light and leading in the most superior set in Golder’s Green, and that there existed between them and Uncle Gerald the deep-seated, never-expressed, hearty dislike of the _poseur_ for the simple and sincere. Had he but known it, Uncle Gerald took care that he never came across them more often than the very remote connection warranted. But Aunt Hildegarde was mother’s only sister, and she seemed the natural guardian for Ronnie, and Uncle Gerald never interfered in other people’s concerns. But he had his doubts, and his heart was sore for the frank, talkative little boy when he left him.