Fragment of Peter Pan and Wendy. “Chapter I: Peter Appears”, by James M. Barrie.
Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just right, and Mr. Darling was obsessed with being just like his neighbors, so naturally they had a nanny. Since they were poor, due to the amount of milk the children drank, their nanny was a prissy Newfoundland bitch named Nana, who hadn’t belonged to anyone in particular until the Darlings hired her. However, children had always seemed important to her and the Darlings met her in Kensington Gardens, where she spent most of her free time poking her nose into prams and was much hated by careless nannies. whom he followed to their homes and then complained about them to their wives.
She proved to be a gem of a babysitter. How meticulous she was at bath time, as well as at any time of the night if one of her wards made the slightest noise. Of course, his kennel was in the nursery. He had a knack for knowing when not to indulge a cough and when to wrap a sock around your throat. To the end of his days he had faith in old-fashioned remedies like rhubarb and sneered at all the fashionable talk about germs and such.
It was a lesson in decorum to watch her escort the children to school, walking quietly beside them if they behaved and forcing them to line up again if they scattered. By the time John started school he never forgot his jumper and usually carried an umbrella in his mouth in case it rained. There is a room at Miss Fulsom’s school where the nannies wait. They sat on the benches, while Nana lay on the floor, but that was the only difference. They pretended not to see her, as they thought she belonged to a lower social class than theirs and she despised their superficial talk. It annoyed her when Mrs. Darling’s friends visited the nursery, but if they did come, she quickly took off Michael’s apron first and put on the blue embroidered one,
