That was all very well; but I was uncertain about Rosamund. She is quite old enough to understand the difference between what Mr. Friswell says in the garden and what the Reverend Thomas Brown-Browne says in the pulpit. I asked her what she had been talking about to Mr. Friswell when he was here last week.
“I believe it was about Elisha,” she replied. “Oh, yes; I remember I asked him if he did not think Elisha a horrid vain old man.”
“You asked him that?”
“Yes; it was in the first lesson last Sunday—that about the bears he brought out of the wood to eat the poor children who had made fun of him—horrid old man!”
“Rosamund, he was a great prophet—one of the greatest,” said I.
“All the same he was horrid! He must have been the vainest as well as the most spiteful old man that ever lived. What a shame to curse the poor children because they acted like children! You know that if that story were told in any other book than the Bible you would be the first to be down on Elisha. If I were to say to you, Daddy, 'Go up, thou bald head!'—you know there's a little bald place on the top there that you try to brush your hair over—if I were to say that to you, what would you do?”
“I suppose I should go at you bald-headed, my dear,” said I incautiously.
“I don't like the Bible made fun of,” said Dorothy, who overheard what I did not mean for any but the sympathetic ears of her eldest daughter.
“I'm not making fun of it, Mammy,” said the daughter. “Just the opposite. Just think of it—forty-two children—only it sounds much more when put the other way, and that makes it all the worse—forty and two poor children cruelly killed because a nasty old prophet was vain and ill-tempered!”
“It doesn't say that he had any hand in it, does it?” I suggested in defence of the Man of God.