It was perfectly true that the dear little girls had, at least, often been told that this was so, and neither Philip nor his wife ever admitted the possibility that their children might have come to draw other conclusions for themselves.
"Vonnie doesn't really enjoy being taken about. I've made a few little experiments with her, quite often, and they've never been a great success," observed Eleanor.
Her idolatry of her younger child had given her occasional moments of insight and she did not possess to the full her husband's monumental capacity for evading the acknowledgment of painful or unpleasant facts. A wistful desire for self-justification sometimes possessed her, and a complete absence of judgment led her to ask it from the quarter in which she was least likely to receive it.
"Why do you say things like that, Clo dear? Vonnie is very happy and well taken care of in the nursery. You don't think there's any jealousy between them?"
"I can hardly credit that Vonnie likes seeing her younger sister always preferred to herself," said Aunt Clo, shrugging her shoulders. "It would scarcely be human nature."
She was merely making application of a rule that she supposed to be general, to a particular case of which she knew nothing.
Vonnie had never in her life been jealous of Lily's privileges—and Lily herself bitterly resented them.
But Aunt Clo, who so scornfully accused her brother and sister-in-law of refusing to face facts, was quite determined that Vonnie was jealous because she was neglected, and that Lily was complacently ready to rob her sister of her rights as eldest.
Even Aunt Clo, however, never in so many words said that Vonnie's intellect was in any way feeble. She only continued to repeat that the child would most certainly never live to grow up, and since neither Eleanor nor Philip would conceivably have allowed, even in their inmost thoughts, that to die might prove very much easier for Vonnie than to live, Miss Stellenthorpe was not again asked to stay with them.
There was no break, or open quarrel—an open quarrel with Philip Stellenthorpe would have been a sheer impossibility—and the nearest that Philip ever allowed himself to go to an analysis of the disagreeable situation was to say to his wife: