In general the whole system lay in developing the child’s reasoning powers and then, at every turn and particularly at every manifestation of indiscipline, appealing to its reason. “I am here to be happy”—that was the first, and surely the kindest and easiest, knowledge to fix in the child. From that foundation everything was worked. It never was necessary to punish a child. It only was necessary to reason with it. In the old phraseology a child meet to be punished was a naughty child. In the terminology of Miss Prescott such a child was a sick child or an unreasoning child: a case presenting an adverse symptom. But take the older term,—a naughty child. A naughty child was an unhappy child. The treatment went like this, “I am here to be happy. I am not happy. Why am I not happy? Because I have done so and so and so and so....”
Kind, wise, simple, effective, easy. Rosalie in her childish misdemeanours would have been prevailed upon by the unhappiness her conduct caused her mother. All wrong! A faulty process of reasoning; indeed not a process of reasoning at all: a crude appeal to the emotions. Those three children who on the one part never saw their mother sad and were constrained to comfort her, on the other never were bribed to good behaviour by the thought of grieving her. They only associated happiness with her and they enjoyed happiness simply by reasoning away unhappiness.
Kind, wise, simple, effective, easy.
Happy Huggo, happy Doda, happy Benji, happy Rosalie!
CHAPTER VIII
It has been said of Time, earlier in these pages, the cloak-and-dagger sort he is, that stalks and pounces. One seeks only to record him when he thus assails, and there is this result; that it is necessary to pare away so much. In instance, there’s to be inserted now a note on Rosalie’s advance in her career. It’s cut to nothing. This is because all that career ultimately was known to her never to have really mattered. And so with other things. That girl, all through, pressing so strong ahead, rises to the eye not cumbered with other importance than her own. There might be asked for (by a reader) presentation of Harry’s parents; of what was doing all this time to her own parents in the rectory, to Harold, Robert, Flora, Hilda; of friends that Rosalie and Harry had. That girl’s passage is not traced in such. Whose is? The chart where such are marked is just a common public print, stamped for the public eye. They’re not set down upon that secret chart all carry in the cabin of their soul, and there, in that so hidden and inviolable stateroom, poring over it by the uncertain swinging lamp of conscience, prick out their way.
Her installation in the bank had been a notable success. She dealt with all the insurance advice and with income-tax advice and business; and it was remarkable to her, at first, how many of Field’s clients were as children in the mysteries of income tax, and as children alike in their ignorance of the possibilities of life insurance and in their pleasure at the discoveries she set before them. But further than this (and more important, said Mr. Sturgiss and Mr. Field) was the quick response of the clients to the various domestic advice that it was Rosalie’s business to give. Husbands and wives from the East, or returned thither from London and writing from the East, consulted her on innumerable matters. When, in instance, an army officer wrote to her from India, very diffidently wondering if she could help him in the matter of some Christmas presents for his wife and children at home, Mr. Sturgiss was uncommonly pleased.
“I knew it!” said Mr. Sturgiss. “That’s the kind of thing. You watch how side-lines like that will develop. That’s what these people want—some one at home they can rely on. I tell you, Mrs. Occleve, you, that is to say your department of Field’s, is what the Anglo-Eastern has been wanting ever since Clive and Warren Hastings went out—a link with home. You see.”