‘Why! of course not, when it happened in America. Papa told us about it. He read it in some paper, I think. Don’t you like learning things in that way?’
‘No. I don’t approve of irregular unsystematic knowledge.’
Dolores has heard her mother say something of this kind, and it came into her head most opportunely as a defence of her father—for she would not for the world have confessed that he did not talk to her as Sir Jasper Merrifield seemed to have done to his children. In fact she rather despised the General for so doing.
‘Oh! but it is such fun picking up things out of lesson time!’ said Mysie.
‘That is the Edge—,’ Dolores was not sure of the word Edgeworthian, so she went on to ‘system. Professor Sefton says he does not approve of harassing children with cramming them with irregular information at all sorts of times. Let play be play and lessons be lessons, he says, not mixed up together, and so Rex and Maude never learnt anything—not a letter—till they were seven years old.’
‘How stupid!’ cried Mysie.
‘Maude’s not stupid!’ cried Dolores, ‘nor the professor either! She’s my great friend.’
‘I didn’t say she was stupid,’ said Mysie, apologetically, ‘only that it must be very stupid not to be able to read till one was seven. Could you?’
‘Oh, yes. I can’t remember when I couldn’t read. But Maude used to play with a little girl who could read and talk French at five years old, and she died of water upon her brain.’
‘Dear me! Primrose can read quite well,’ said Mysie, somewhat alarmed; ‘but then,’ she went on in a reassured voice, ‘so could all of us except Jasper and Gillian, and they felt the heat so much at Gibraltar that they were quite stupid while they were there.’