“Poor little fellow! But indeed, if I may say so, I’m quite sure that you’re taking it a great deal too seriously, Mrs. Aviolet. How old is he?”
“Not quite eight.”
“Why, he’s only a baby. You know they say that the age of reason is seven years old, not before. You’ll have broken him of his bad habit long before he has to go to school.”
“If I thought it was only a bad habit—I can’t explain properly, but it seems to me more than that. I can’t get anybody to understand what I mean,” she said confusedly. “It’s like a sort of kink in his mind. And while that’s there, I don’t think he’s fit for school—not any more than if he was physically deformed. They won’t understand him there—I know they won’t.”
“Masters are necessarily men with a wide experience, you know. They are accustomed to deal with every type of boy, after all. Perhaps they may be more understanding than you imagine.”
“Then you think Cecil ought to go to school? You won’t speak to Ford about it?”
There was a sound of pitiful disappointment in her voice. Charlesbury, loyal to the traditions of his caste, yet spoke with quick and sincere compassion.
“Don’t—don’t think that I can’t sympathize with you. I can and do, intensely. Only forgive me if I ask whether you quite realize what a frightful handicap it is for any boy, any English boy, to miss that magnificent public-school training of ours? It’s like nothing else, you know—I mean, there’s no substitute.”
“I suppose not. Most of the men I’ve known haven’t been public-school boys, except, of course, my husband.”
The silence that fell between them made rather too clear their mutual conviction that Jim Aviolet, at least, had been a singularly unfavourable advertisement for the system of education that had produced him.