“Oh, you absurd parents! You are too good and earnest, and altogether too droll! Why in the world, instead of sitting there with blank eyes—conjuring up bogeys to frighten each other—why don’t you look the thing in the face, and find out by the light of modern thought what really ails Fan? Poor pet! ‘Save me from my parents!’ is a rendering which might be forgiven her.”
“Then you don’t think there’s any mental trouble?” we cried in a breath, feeling already as if a burden were lifted, and we could straighten our backs and walk abroad.
“‘Mental trouble?’ What nonsense! But there, I believe all you parents are alike. Each pair thinks their own experiences entirely new; their own children the first of the kind born into the world. Now, a mind that had had any scientific training would see at once that poor Fanny’s lies—if I must use John’s terrible bad word—inventions, I should have called them, are symptomatic, as you rightly guessed, Annie, of certain brain conditions; but of brain disease—oh, no! Why, foolish people, don’t you see you are entertaining an angel unawares? This vice of ‘lying’ you are mourning over is the very quality that goes to the making of poets!”
“Poets and angels are well in their places,” said John, rather crossly, “but my child must speak the truth. What she states for a fact, I must know to be a fact, according to the poor common-sense view of benighted parents.”
“And there is your work as parents. Teach her truth, as you would teach her French or sums—a little to-day, a little more to-morrow, and every day a lesson. Only as you teach her the nature of truth will the gift she has be effectual. But I really should like to know what is your notion about truth—are we born with it, or educated up to it?”
“I am not sure that we care to be experimented upon, and held up to the world as blundering parents,” said I; “perhaps we had better keep our crude notions to ourselves.” I spoke rather tartly, I know, for I was more vexed for John than for myself. That he should be held up to ridicule in his own house—by a sister of mine, too!
“Now I have vexed you both. How horrid I am! And all the time, as I watch you with the children, I don’t feel good enough to tie your shoes. Don’t I say to myself twenty times a day, ‘After all, the insight and love parents get from above is worth a thousandfold more than science has to teach’?”
“Nay, Emma, ’tis we who have to apologise for being jealous of science—that’s the fact—and quick to take offence. Make it up, there’s a good girl! and let Annie and me have the benefit of your advice about our little girl, for truly we are in a fog.”
“Well, I think you were both right in considering that her failing had two sources: moral cowardice the first; she does something wrong, or wrong in her eyes, and does not tell—why?”
“Aye, there’s the difficulty; why is she afraid to tell the truth? I may say that we have never punished her, or ever looked coldly on her for any fault but this of prevarication. The child is so timid that we feared severe measures might make the truth the more difficult.”