How could Cecil be such a fool, she asked herself furiously. The silly, boastful lie was predestined to certain contradiction. Only her own passionate instinct of safe-guarding her boy from the contempt and condemnation of others had saved her from an instant denial of the preposterous figment of the scholarship. Not one of the others—Sir Thomas, Lady Aviolet, Diana, any of them—would have either the wit or the charity to leave the old General under his deception, should it occur to him to mention it to them.
She could see, in furious imagination, the blank glance and open-mouthed repudiation with which any one of them would receive such an allusion.
Was it possible that Cecil could not see that too? Rose momentarily lacked the moral courage to face the issue involved in that question. But as time went on, she was forced to consider it.
Cecil, now-a-days voluble and ready to please and be pleased, was attractive to older people by reason of his good looks and his youthfulness. Contemporaries of his grandparents, and even of his mother, liked the boy at first sight, and showed him kindly attention, as had old General Marchmont. He always responded readily, with an evident eagerness to be liked and thought well of that seemed mysteriously to have sprung from the ashes of his schoolboy apathy and dejection. Rose knew that the Aviolets, Lady Aviolet especially, were pleased at this development. She felt sure that they did not perceive that of which she herself was becoming sharply and painfully aware, that sooner or later these kindly people seemed to lose touch with Cecil. They became indifferent, or faintly puzzled, and they no longer sought him out.
Cecil himself appeared to be oddly inured to such shifting relationships. He seemed to pass on, equally eager and hopeful, in search of other friends to whom he might present a more appealing aspect.
For he was acutely preoccupied with his own presentment of himself. Of that Rose, forced into psychological analysis as unfamiliar to her as it was difficult of achievement, had at last become conscious. He recounted imaginary achievements for his own glorification, and related unlikely experiences or future projects obviously intended to render himself interesting to his hearers.
“But everybody does that more or less,” Rose angrily assured herself.
At the back of her mind, unformulated, hung uneasily the sense that Cecil did not pose merely in the foolish, superficial manner habitual to youth. He invented—but he did not delude himself. And he appeared strangely unawakened to the probability that neither did he, at any rate for long, succeed in deluding others.
As in the case of his imaginary scholarship, exploited to General Marchmont, Rose often found that he was incredibly reckless to the certainty of detection.
“Either he doesn’t care—or he doesn’t realize,” she thought, bewildered and wretched.