“Is little Cecil afraid of being despised?”
“Well, of course he is. Who isn’t, I should like to know?”
The doctor answered her indignant inquiry as though she had meant it literally.
“The very obtuse are not, nor the essentially self-satisfied. Neither, I think, are the absolutely sincere—but then, they are seldom the very young. It is the weak, and the sensitive, and those who are unsure of themselves, who are afraid of the contempt of their mental inferiors. And so they degrade themselves by lying.”
He spoke so simply and earnestly that the protest died away on Rose’s lips.
“Mrs. Aviolet, I’m intensely interested in your boy. May I ask you something?”
She nodded, her eyes full of tears.
“Can you analyse this weakness of his? I mean, what do his untruths spring from?”
“I don’t know.” She looked puzzled. “He invents things that never happened, sometimes—that never could have happened—and then when I try to make him say that it’s all pretending, he won’t. Sometimes I think he doesn’t know whether he’s inventing or speaking the truth.”
The doctor nodded, reflective.