“But your father was, and we were always together until he went to school.”
“Then I can’t think,” meditatively, “why it is that you aren’t the least little bit like father. Father is so splendid and good.”
“And I am not good? Poor me!”
“I——I didn’t mean that exactly, Uncle Cyril. I meant perhaps you were good in a different way—perhaps it’s a London way. Nurse always says London is a very wicked place.”
“Thank you again, Phil! Or am I to understand that you are labouring to express the difference between the Absolute and the Relative?”
“Oh no, you don’t understand one bit. It is like the children where nurse was last, when she lived at General Clarendon’s. His grandchildren were so dreadfully good you can’t think! They never quarrelled, or did anything they liked, or wanted to do anything they were told not to, or forgot to come to have their hands washed and put on clean pinafores. Well, one day when nurse had been telling us a lot about them, Usk said all at once, ‘I don’t believe they were always as good as that. I expect you’ll tell the children where you go next how good we were.’ Wasn’t it dreadful? And nurse was so angry! She put on her spectacles and looked at Usk and said, ‘Well, my lord, at any rate I’ll take my oath that never in all my experience did I know a young gentleman stand up to me before and call me a liar to my face.’”
“We seem to be wandering a little from the point of the argument,” suggested Cyril mildly.
“Oh, but don’t you see it shows—no, I don’t mean that—I can’t think what I meant—— Oh, Uncle Cyril, there’s a telegraph-boy! Let us race and catch him before he gets to the house.”
Before Cyril could even rise from his seat, she was at the foot of the wall and running across the park at a pace which the boy, who was lounging comfortably along the drive, and displaying his interest in the natural objects on either side to the extent of throwing stones at them, made no attempt to excel or even to emulate. When Cyril came up, Philippa was in possession of the telegram, and was ordering the boy to go on to the Castle and get some bread and cheese and lemonade from the cook.
“That was a nice boy,” she remarked with much gratification, as the boy departed. “He touched his cap, and said, ‘Thank you, my lady.’ Sometimes they just race off without saying anything. But mother says we mustn’t be cross, because they haven’t had any one to teach them better.”