Would succeeding attacks, following encounters with picture or reality, progressively increase in severity?
Her boy in an asylum?
No. He was exaggerating an almost expected consequence that might never be repeated—especially if the child were most carefully and gradually reintroduced to the present terror. Later though—much later on.
Meanwhile, wait and hope: hope and wait….
CHAPTER III.
THE SNAKE APPEARS.
The European child who grows up in India, if only to the age of six or seven years, grows under a severe moral, physical, and mental handicap.
However wise, devoted, and conscientious its parents may be, the evil is great, and remains one of the many heavy costs (or punishments) of Empire.
When the child has no mother and an indifferent father, life’s handicap is even more severe.
By his sixth birthday (the regiment being still in Bimariabad owing to the prevalence of drought, famine, and cholera elsewhere) Damocles de Warrenne, knowing the Urdu language and argot perfectly, knew, in theory also, more of evil, in some directions, than did his own father.
If the child who grows up absolutely straight-forward, honest, above-board and pure in thought, word, and deed, in England, deserves commendation, what does the child deserve who does so in India?