“I know those are the modern ideas,” said Lady Aviolet, seeming rather piteously eager to demonstrate her readiness to accept views that were new to her, and which the doctor knew that she therefore distrusted instinctively.
“It was Ford’s idea that we might consult you about it. It’s not the way we were brought up, if you’ll forgive me saying so—a naughty child was a naughty child, and a sick one was a sick one—but Ford says that everyone now has this idea that the mind and the body are very closely concerned, and react on one another. I daresay there may be something in it.”
“Everything, I should say.”
“And Rose—my daughter-in-law—speaks of this trouble as a kink. She says it’s always been there—that little Cecil’s word has never been reliable. I don’t really know whether she quite realizes what a sad and shocking thing it is. Of course, her own upbringing—— However, that’s neither here nor there. Of course, she spoils him dreadfully.”
“A risk that all only children must run,” the doctor reminded her.
“I don’t know. Ford was an only child for nearly five years, and he wasn’t spoilt.”
There was a sort of obtuse naïveté about Lady Aviolet’s habit of referring any question to her own individual experience that somehow detracted from the glaring certainty that her experience was of a singularly limited kind.
“It was my maid who first spoke to me about Cecil—poor Dawson. You know how devoted she is to us all, and always has been, and I always thought that Jim, if anything, was her favourite of the two boys. So you can imagine that she wouldn’t be very likely to look for faults in Jim’s boy. But she’s been looking after him till we’ve found a governess, and almost from the very first evening he started telling her the most wonderful stories. About things he’d done—or rather hadn’t done—in Ceylon. He told her he always rode on an elephant, and had little native children to pick up his toys, and I don’t know what else—all pure invention, of course.”
“That might have been in the spirit of boasting!”
“But how dreadful! Why should he boast?”