“Maurice!”
“I don’t mean the fact, but its significance.”
“What fact?”
“The fact that something or someone, at that public school, has altered Cecil Aviolet radically, in some way that’s indefinable. It’s not the normal evolution of a type, Henrietta, nor the development of an individuality—it’s something apart from those. And I don’t know what it is.”
“Has he been—frightened?” she half whispered.
“I don’t think it’s that. He may have been frightened—but I don’t think it’s that now.”
“He wasn’t ever a coward,” Henrietta declared vehemently. “I don’t care what any one says, he was a plucky little boy enough.”
“I have never thought him a coward,” said the doctor quietly. “But for all that, he may have been frightened.”
“Bullying?”
“He’s not the sort that gets bullied, much. And I don’t think—mind you, this is only conjecture—but I don’t think he’d mind being bullied, if it only meant being knocked about.”