"What have you done about your own boy?" said he, with a kind of magnanimous impatience. "Come! That's the point."
"Nothing. At least, I have sent him to Rugby, where he will be brought up a member of the Church of England."
"But before?"
"I left him to his mother—at least, his aunt.... I told you...."
"I know."
"So you observe that with respect to Master Bob I have pursued a policy of well-considered devolution of responsibility. Perhaps I should say of evasion. However, I think I may lay claim to having given my son every reasonable opportunity of believing the creeds that will best advance his interests in the world. He has had the advantage of imbibing them from a lady who enjoys the privilege of being able to believe what she chooses, and has inherited or selected the tenets of the well-to-do. He has been till lately at a preparatory Academy, where every one of the masters is in orders, and every other boy the son of a Bishop. And now he's gone to Rugby! What can a human father do more, in the name of respectability?"
"My dear Challis, if you want to make your son's education a text for a sermon against worldliness and hypocrisy, do so by all means. We have weak joints enough in our armour, God knows, for you to shoot your arrows into. But let me finish finding fault with you first."
Challis slipped his arm into the Rector's. "Go on finding fault," he said. "Don't finish too soon."
"I won't. It seems to me, my dear friend, that under cover of a complete confession you have contrived to raise issues which have nothing to do with the question before the House, which I take to be—what is a father's conscientious duty towards the child for whose existence he is partly responsible? I want to keep you to the point."
"I'm a slippery customer, I know. Go on."