“It might have been worse,” said Lucilla. “It might have been the one in which you said that the parental instinct was only another name for the possessive instinct. And now I come to think of it, that one was called The Sanctification of Domestic Tyranny, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” said Quentillian, in a tone which struck himself as being rather that of a defiant child to its nurse.
“Well, Father would have liked that even less than the Myth of Self-Sacrifice, I imagine.”
She spoke without acrimony, without, in fact, any effect at all of personal bias, but Quentillian said dispassionately:
“You dislike the modern school of thought of which my writings are a feeble example. May I ask why you read them?”
“But I don’t dislike it, Owen,” she returned with a calm at least equal to his own. “As for what you write, I think you’re very often mistaken, but that doesn’t prevent my being interested.”
Quentillian was slightly taken aback at being considered mistaken, and still more at being told so. He had always respected Lucilla, both morally and intellectually, and he would have preferred to suppose the admiration mutual.
“Owen, haven’t you got anything else that he could have to read?” broke in Flora.
“Nothing that he would—care for,” answered Quentillian, who had very nearly said “Nothing that he would understand.”
“Father has asked for the Review, Flossie, and you’d better get it. You needn’t work yourself up about it. He knows its general character quite as well as you do.”