“I don't understand how Content's big sister Solly could possibly go away if she was never here.”
“Little Lucy, I wouldn't ask you to tell a lie for the world, but if you were just to say that you heard me say—”
“I think it would be a lie,” said little Lucy, “because how can I help knowing if she was never here she couldn't—”
“Oh, well, little Lucy,” cried Jim, in despair, still with tenderness—how could he be anything but tender with little Lucy?—“all I ask is never to say anything about it.”
“If they ask me?”
“Anyway, you can hold your tongue. You know it isn't wicked to hold your tongue.”
Little Lucy absurdly stuck out the pointed tip of her little red tongue. Then she shook her head slowly.
“Well,” she said, “I will hold my tongue.”
This encounter with innocence and logic had left him worsted. Jim could see no way out of the fact that his father, the rector, his mother, the rector's wife, and he, the rector's son, were disgraced by their relationship to such an unsanctified little soul as this queer Content Adams.
And yet he looked at the poor lonely little girl, who was trying very hard to learn her lessons, who suggested in her very pose and movement a little, scared rabbit ready to leap the road for some bush of hiding, and while he was angry with her he pitied her. He had no doubts concerning Content's keeping her promise. He was quite sure that he would now say nothing whatever about that big sister Solly to the others, but he was not prepared for what happened that very afternoon.