I gloried in the knowledge how much more charming the
other two were than anyone guessed, who thought them models of
propriety.
In truth, Dermot did not keep that reputation much longer than his
petticoats. Ere long he was a pickle of the first order, equalling
the sublime naughtiness of Holiday House, and was continually being
sent home by private tutors, who could not manage him. All the time
I had a secret conviction that, if he had been my own mother's son,
she could have managed him, and he would never have even wished to do
what she disapproved; but Lady Diana had no sympathy or warmth in
her, and while she loved her children she fretted them, and never
thawed nor unbent; and when she called in her brother's support,
Dermot's nerves were driven frantic by the long harangues, and his
relief was in antics which of course redoubled his offence. After he
had put crackers into his uncle's boots, peppered the coachman's wig,
inserted a live toad in the centre of a fortification of clear jelly
at a great luncheon, and had one Christmas painted the two stone wild
boars that guard the iron gates of Erymanth Castle into startling
resemblance of the porkers as displayed in butchers' shops, with a
little tin pail at the snout of each, labelling each sevenpence-
ha'penny per pound, his uncle had little more hope of him.
Dreading his father's fate for him, Lady Diana put him into the
Guards, to prevent him from living in Ireland, and there he fell into
all the usual temptations of his kind, so that everybody came to look
on him as a black sheep, and all the time I knew that, if any one had
taken him in the right way, he might have been kept out of it.
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