“It always does, but do go on.”
“Directly you give me a chance, dear. Waring opened the campaign with a little small talk as he always does, but it was quite off-hand and reckless to-day. He had hardly set his gentle tap fairly flowing however, when his wife suddenly woke up and chipped in with quite phenomenal clearness and precision,
“‘Dear Henry, suppose we state the object of our call, we can converse afterwards.’
“Then it all came out. First one stated a fact or a theory then the other had his innings. It was hard enough to follow the two and to watch them at the same time; one never likes to miss the moment when they clasp hands again and the little looks they cast on each other in the process. It appears the pair meditate a definite experiment on those wretched children, and want my help in securing a bear-leader for the task.”
“Good gracious!” gasped Mrs. Fellowes. “Go on,” she commanded grimly, “what is it?”
“On no account whatever is either to be sent to school or allowed to hold intercourse with other children; no woman is to have any hand in their tuition; naturally, cricket, football, and every other boyish sport is to be carefully excluded from the curriculum, and all Christian teaching is to be utterly tabooed.”
“Mercy on us!”
“The facts of the Old Testament are to be imparted to them with other ancient history, and they are to be well instructed in the natural sciences. By these means they will learn to know God in His Works—with a capital ‘W’—Mrs. Waring observed this solemnly to her husband for my benefit. ‘Exactly, my darling,’ he replied, with a most surprising alacrity—they had rehearsed this point, those two babies.—When the children are launched into their teens and have presumably arrived at an age of more or less discretion, the Bible and any other existing evidences of Christianity obtainable, are to be formally presented to them. The imps may then receive these or reject them according to their particular turn of mind, but in no case are they to be biased.
“The parents have seemingly occupied themselves a good deal with this part of the experiment and regard this presentation of a choice of beliefs as a sort of function on which they mean to take exhaustive observation.”
The rector paused to roll another cigarette; when he had finished and lighted it, he went on.