"Then it's only old people who mind being asked their age. Is that why you won't tell me yours, Father, because you're so old?"
Philip was exceedingly sensitive about his age, and quite incapable of assessing the utter meaninglessness of his son's estimate.
"That's a naughty, heartless way of speaking," he said, deeply hurt. "I don't want to talk any more to little people who can speak like that."
"Oh well, it doesn't matter," said Kenneth with supreme indifference. "I s'pose you're about seventy or eighty. I didn't know you'd mind being asked."
In the last assertion lay the painful core of the matter. Kenneth really didn't know, as Lily, and even Vonnie, had known, as much by intuition as by training, what Philip would "mind."
He transgressed constantly, and was gaily impervious to the devastating effect of his transgressions upon his father and, by reflection, upon Lily. But Lily secretly admired Kenneth, and envied him that pachydermatous courage of his own convictions that she herself had never acquired.
Kenneth was never afraid of being himself, although that self in no slightest degree corresponded to Philip's ideal of a motherless little boy of nine years old.
He went to school and was not in the least homesick, and he seemed to be neither grieved nor ashamed when Philip expressed great disappointment at his first report.
"I hoped you would have been proud to bring back some nice prize or other to show me," said Philip wistfully.
"Prizes are fearful rot," said Kenneth.