"Thanks. Is there any thing else you would like to say to me in your capacity as clergyman before we join the others?"
"Yes, if I may really venture so far. Your hat is quite crooked."
Gerald straightened it without a smile. "Thanks again. Anything else?"
"Absolutely nothing." He turned to escort her back, but Gerald stood still, frowning out at the lake.
"You don't know Olly," she said, curtly.
"Maybe not, but I know childish nature pretty well, perhaps because
I love it."
"Ah! I don't love it. It isn't lovable to me. It is all nonsense to call it the age of innocence. It is vice in embryo instead of in full leaf, that is all."
"But that is an inestimable gain of itself. A little of a bad thing is surely much better than a great deal of it. For my part I confess to a great partiality for children. There is something pathetic to me in the little faults and tempers that irritate us now chiefly because they clash against our own weaknesses, and yet on the right guidance of which lies the whole making or marring of the child's life."
"Doesn't guidance include punishment?"
"Yes, it includes it. But it does not consist of it."