“What?” Rose asked almost involuntarily.
“She said Cecil would never get into the Hurst Cricket Eleven unless he practised really hard. And she told us about Lord Charlesbury’s little boy—didn’t she, Cecil?—who bowled some other boy out first ball, and the middle stump actually went flying, although the bails stopped on.”
“I see,” said Rose dully.
Not for the world would she have exposed Cecil in Miss Wade’s presence. She would not even look at him.
“Come along,” said Miss Wade, in her voice of manufactured brightness.
Cecil had rapidly turned from white to scarlet, but when he saw that his mother had no intention of humiliating him by any spoken comment, his face cleared. He ran up to her and kissed her, and said “Good-bye, Mummie,” quite cheerfully before he went away with Miss Wade.
She felt that he would easily succeed in putting the whole incident quite out of his thoughts.
“But why—why does he do it?” reflected Rose miserably.
She was incapable of searching out the basic foundations for Cecil’s perversion of the truth. The crux of the matter, to her, lay in the bald fact that he told lies; not at all in the existence of a fundamental self-distrust and craving for the reassurance of praise and approval that provided a motive for the lies.
“I can’t make him good,” said Rose to herself desperately.