Hugh Walpole

“ Fearful lest she should begin to cry again, he said hurriedly:
“Here’s Hamlet. He’s always been in the kitchen. He’s not going to be any longer.”
Hamlet followed him downstairs, but still with reluctant dignity. The moment of his surrender had been covered, and he did not know that he would now surrender after all. He would see. Meanwhile he smelt food, and where food was he must be.
Tea was in the schoolroom. Miss Jones, the governess, was away on her holiday, and Jeremy saw at once that the worst thing possible had occurred: his Aunt Amy, whom he did not love, was in charge of the tea-table. ”

“ Jeremy stood, his legs apart, looking down upon his dog. He saw how fat he was, how deeply engrossed in his bone, how dribbling at the jaws.
“Hamlet!” he said. He repeated the name three times. At the third call the dog looked up, then went back to his bone. Mrs. Hounslow sniffed.
Meanwhile in Hamlet’s soul something was stirring—memories, affections, sentiments. ... He licked the bone again. It no longer tasted so sweet as before. He looked up at Mrs. Hounslow imploringly.
She declared herself. “He do love the kitchen. If there’s one place where he loves to be, it’s the kitchen. ”

“ When he was half-way down the stairs he caught the echo of a voice: “Tea, Jeremy. All ready in the schoolroom.” But he did not pause. In the hall he saw the housemaid. “I say, where’s Hamlet?” he cried.
“In the kitchen, I expect, Master Jeremy,” she answered.
In the kitchen, she expected! Why should she expect it? Hamlet never used to be in the kitchen. His heart began to beat angrily. The kitchen? That was not the place for a dog like Hamlet. He stumbled down the dark stairs into the basement. Mrs. Hounslow was standing beside the kitchen table, her sleeves rolled up above her elbows ”

“ They were grouped about the stair, Helen and Mary, Barbara and the nurse, Mr. and Mrs. Cole and Aunt Amy in the hall below. Helen, Mary and Barbara were wearing cocked hats made of coloured paper and carried silver tissue wands in their hands. Barbara was eating her tissue paper with great eagerness and a vivid, absorbed attention. Helen looked pretty and bored; Mary was in a state of the utmost nervousness, clutching Hamlet with one hand while in the other she held a toy trumpet and a crumpled piece of paper. ”

“ Of course he did not think all this out. He only sat on his bed kicking his legs, looking at the well-remembered furniture of his room, vaguely discontented and unhappy. What fun it had been that morning, ragging Miss Taylor, laughing at the guard of the train, saying good-bye to old Mumpsey Thompson who recently spoke to him as though he were a man, asking him whether his parents had decided upon the public school to which, in two years’ time, he would be going—Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Craxton, Rugby, Crale and so on. Time to decide, time to decide! ”

“ His dislike arose more probably from the certainty that she would always stroke him the wrong way, would poke her fingers into his defenceless eyes, would try to drag him on to her sharp, razor-edged knees and would talk to him in that meaningless sing-song especially invented by the sentimental of heart and slow of brain for the enchantment of babies and animals. ”

“ Helen hated him. Mary loved him but was so jealous of Jeremy’s affection for him that she was not sorry to see him banished; and Barbara, only two and a half, had as yet very tenuous ideas on this subject.
Mrs. Hounslow, a very fat, sentimental woman, liked to have something or someone at her side to give her rich but transient emotions—emotions evoked by a passing band, the reading of an accident in the newspaper, or some account of an event in the royal family. The kitchen-maid, a girl of no home and very tender years, longed for affection from somebody, but Mrs. ”