n't care."

"You know what happened to 'Don't Care.' I shall have to punish you if
you're rude to me."

"What have I done that's rude?"

"You mustn't speak to me like that. Is that the way you speak to your
mother?"

"No, Aunt Amy."

"Well, then, if you don't speak to your mother like that, you mustn't
speak to me like that, either."

"No, Aunt Amy."

"Well, then..."

This hatred was quite new to him. He had once, years ago, hated a
black-faced doll that had been given to him. He had not known why he
hated it, but there it had been. He had thrown it out of the window, and
the gardener had found it and brought it into the house again, battered
and bruised, but still alive, with its horrid red smile, and this had
terrified him... He had begun to burn it, and the nurse had caught him
and slapped him. He had begun to cut it with scissors, and when the
sawdust flowed he was more terrified than ever. But that doll was quite
different from Aunt Amy. He was not terrified of her at all. He hated
her. Hated the fringe of her black hair, the heavy eyelashes, the thin
down on her upper lip, the way that the gold cross fell up and down on
her breast, her thin, blue-veined hands, her black shoes. She was his
first enemy, and he waited, as an ambush hides and watches, for his
opportunity...

II

One of our nicest old maids, Miss Maddison, gave every year what she
called her "early summer party." This was different from all our other
parties, because it occurred neither in the summer nor in the winter,
but always during those wonderful days when the spring first began
to fade into the high bright colours, the dry warmth, the deep green
shadows of the heat of the year. It was early in May that Miss Maddison
had her party, and we played games on her little sloping green lawn,
and peered over her pink-brick wall down on to the brown roofs of the
houses below the Close, and had a tremendous tea of every kind of cake
and every kind of jam in her wainscoted dining-room that looked out
through its tall open windows on to the garden. Those old houses that
run in a half-moon round the Close, and face the green sward and the
great western door of the Cathedral, are the very heart of Polchester.
Walking down the cobbled street, one may still to-day look through the
open door, down the dusky line of the little hall, out into the swimming
colour of the garden beyond. In these little gardens, what did not grow?
Hollyhocks, pin