“You may say so!” Mrs. Aviolet remarked in heartfelt accents. “But it isn’t only that—though to my dying day I don’t suppose I shall ever see what they’re driving at, half the time—it’s the children. Inheriting two lots of instincts, so to speak, poor little things. I know quite well that my mother-in-law thinks poor little Cecil’s trouble is all owing to his belonging what-you-may-call to the people, one side of him. In a way, I suppose I agree. The high-and-mighty Aviolets were never anything but honourable, were they?”
“In the conventional sense of the word, perhaps not,” said Miss Lucian.
“The conventional sense of the word is all they want,” said Rose simply, quite without irony.
She was very glad when the time came for her to take Cecil to London. He had been wildly and defiantly naughty since his punishment, but he had not again been untruthful.
“Wilful naughtiness is one thing, and underhand ways are another,” Miss Wade primly observed. “I can understand a child—a boy especially—being spoilt and disobedient from time to time, but there is something terrible about a child that is habitually untruthful. It seems so unnatural.”
“I think little Cecil’s disgrace the other day has shown him what a frightful thing untruth is,” Lady Aviolet said. “I hope we may never have to repeat such a thing.”
“It was evidently what the boy needed,” Sir Thomas said curtly.
It struck Rose that all of them unconsciously relied upon their own powers of observation to tell them what effect the experiment in discipline had had upon Cecil.
Hardly aware of the elementary psychological instinct that prompted her, Rose trusted neither to their perceptions nor to her own. She tried to find out from the little boy, himself, what their punishment had meant to him.
“You won’t let them say ever again that you tell stories, will you, darling? If one does slip out, come and tell Mother, and I promise no one shall be angry or punish you. Only tell me about it.”