“It made a noise like funerals and things,” Robert explained.

“Well, it seems to me you’ve been playing a funeral march,” said Edward Henry to the child.

He thought this rather funny, rather worthy of himself, but the child answered with ruthless gravity and a touch of disdain (for he was a disdainful child, without bowels): 

“I don’t know what you mean, father.”  The curve of his lips (he had his grandmother’s lips) appeared to say:  “I wish you wouldn’t try to be silly, father.”  However, youth forgets very quickly, and the next instant Robert was beginning once more, “Father!”

“Well, Robert?”

By mutual agreement of the parents the child was never addressed as “Bob” or “Bobby,” or by any other diminutive.  In their practical opinion a child’s name was his name, and ought not to be mauled or dismembered on the pretext of fondness.  Similarly, the child had not been baptized after his father, or after any male member of either the Machin or the Cotterill family.  Why should family names be perpetuated merely because they were family names?  A natural human reaction, this, against the excessive sentimentalism of the Victorian era!

“What does ‘stamped out’ mean?” Robert inquired.

Now Robert, among other activities, busied himself in the collection of postage stamps, and in consequence his father’s mind, under the impulse of the question, ran immediately to postage stamps.

“Stamped out?” said Edward Henry, with the air of omniscience that a father is bound to assume.  “Postage stamps are stamped out—­by a machine—­you see.”

Robert’s scorn of this explanation was manifest.

“Well,” Edward Henry, piqued, made another attempt, “you stamp a fire out with your feet.”  And he stamped illustratively on the floor.  After all, the child was only eight.

“I knew all that before,” said Robert, coldly.  “You don’t understand.”

“What makes you ask, dear?  Let us show father your leg.”  Nellie’s voice was soothing.

“Yes,” Robert murmured, staring reflectively at the ceiling.  “That’s it.  It says in the Encyclopaedia that hydrophobia is stamped out in this country—­by Mr..  Long’s muzzling order.  Who is Mr..  Long?”

A second bomb had fallen on exactly the same spot as the first, and the two exploded simultaneously.  And the explosion was none the less terrible because it was silent and invisible.  The tidy domestic chamber was strewn in a moment with an awful mass of wounded susceptibilities.  Beyond the screen the nick-nick of grandmother’s steel needles stopped and started again.  It was characteristic of her temperament that she should recover before the younger generations could recover.  Edward Henry, as befitted his sex, regained his nerve a little earlier than Nellie.

“I told you never to touch my Encyclopaedia,” said he, sternly.  Robert had twice been caught on his stomach on the floor with a vast volume open under his chin, and his studies had been traced by vile thumb-marks.