“To know, Harry,” said Mrs. Burton, “that you gave so little true personal attention to Budge and Toddie, while you professed to love them with the tenderness peculiar to blood-relationship, is to wonder whether some people do not really expect children to grow as the forest trees grow, utterly without care or training.”
“I spent most of my time,” Mr. Burton replied, attacking his steak with more energy than was called for at the breakfast-table of a man whose business hours were easy, “I spent most of my time in saving their parents’ property and their own lives from destruction. When had I an opportunity to do anything else?”
A smile of conscious superiority, the honesty of which made it none the less tantalizing, passed lightly over Mrs. Burton’s features as she replied:
“All the while. You should have explained to them the necessity for order, cleanliness and self-restraint. Do you imagine that their pure little hearts would not have received it and acted upon it?”
Mr. Burton offered a Yankee reply.
“Do you suppose, my dear,” said he “that the necessity for all these virtues was never brought to their attention? Did you never hear the homely but significant saying, that you may lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink?”
With the promptness born of true intuition, Mrs. Burton went around this verbal obstacle instead of attempting to reduce it.
“You might at least have attempted to teach them something of the inner significance of things,” said Mrs. Burton. “Then they would have brought a truer sense to the contemplation of everything about them.”
Mr. Burton gazed almost worshipfully at this noble creature whose impulses led her irresistibly to the discernment of the motives of action, and with becoming humility he asked:
“Will you tell me how you would have explained the inner significance of dirt, so that those boys could have been trusted to cross a dry road without creating for themselves a halo which should be more visible than luminous?”