.
Look at him now, for instance; a cripple for life, and pretending to
see nothing in it but a joke, and expressing as much admiration for
his horrible wooden leg as though it had been a king's sceptre! In
Aunt Charlotte's view, Austin ought to have pitied himself immensely,
and expressed a hope that God would help him to bear his burden with
orthodox resignation to the Divine will; instead of which, he seemed
totally unconscious of having any burden at all--a state of mind that
was nothing less than impious. Austin was now seventeen, and it was
high time that he took more serious views of life. Ever since he was a
baby he had been her special charge; for his mother had died in giving
him birth, and his father had followed her about a twelvemonth later.
She had always done her duty to the boy, and loved him as though he
had been her own; but she reminded onlookers rather of a conscientious
elderly cat with limited views of natural history condemned by
circumstances to take care of a very irresponsible young eaglet. The
eaglet, on his side, was entirely devoted to his protectress, but it
was impossible for him not to feel a certain lenient and amused
contempt for her very limited horizon.

"Auntie," he said to her one day, "you're just like a frog at the
bottom of a well. You think the speck of blue you see above you is the
entire sky, and the water you paddle up and down in is the ocean. Why
can't you take a rather more cosmic view of things?"

This extraordinary remark occurred in the course of a wrangle between
the two, because Austin insisted on his pet cat--a plump, white,
matronly creature he had christened 'Gioconda,' because (so _he_ said)
she always smiled so sweetly--sitting up at the dinner-table and being
fed with tit-bits off his own fork; and Aunt Charlotte objected to
this proceeding on the ground that the proper place for cats was in
the kitchen. Austin, on his side, averred that cats were in many ways
much superior to human beings; that they had been worshipped as gods
by the philosophical Egyptians because they were so scornful and
mysterious; and that Gioconda herself was not only the divinest cat
alive, but entitled to respect, if only as an embodiment and
representative of cat-hood in the abstract, which was a most important
element in the economy of the universe. It was when Aunt Charlotte
stigmatised these philosophical reflections as a pack of impertinent
twaddle that Austin had had the audacity