She stifled the disloyal thought, suppressing it. Suppression was in fact the only recognized method for dealing with any and every form of naughtiness.
It was naughty, obviously, since it was forbidden, for Lily and Yvonne to buy sweets.
"You don't want to spend your money on nasty, cheap sweets, my dear children" was Philip's fashion of discouraging a propensity to which he himself happened never to have been liable.
Yvonne and Lily did want to spend their money on buying the sweets very often, but they were successfully debarred from doing so by the unpleasant conviction that the wish, for some quite unexplained reason, was something degrading and to be concealed with shame.
Even expensive chocolates, occasionally bestowed by visitors, were kept in the drawing-room and decorously handed round after tea when the children came downstairs.
"Don't they want to take them upstairs and finish the box in the nursery?" jovial Cousin Charlie Hardinge had once enquired, looking on with surprise.
"Oh dear no, this is quite an old-established custom. They like this way of doing it, don't you, Lily my pet?"
"Yes," said Lily, smiling happily.
She was far too responsive not to know instinctively just how terribly hurt and disconcerted Father and Mother would have been if she had answered otherwise.
Vonnie was at once less intuitive and more honest. But then she was very seldom appealed to, and even when both were impartially addressed, it was always Lily who made reply, partly from the old instinct of safeguarding Vonnie. It was so certain that Vonnie would blindly sacrifice Father's and Mother's feelings to her own truthfulness, and find herself in tacit disgrace thereby!