HUMBUG

A STUDY IN EDUCATION

BY E. M. DELAFIELD

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922

Set up and Printed. Published February, 1922.

TO PAUL
HUSBAND and COMRADE

For the friendship of our days,

For your very pleasant ways,

For the many times we've laughed,

For your kindness to my craft,

Let me dedicate to you

The book of mine I hold most true.

"If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence."

SAMUEL BUTLER.

"I think the Church Catechism has a good deal to do with the unhappy relations that commonly even now exist between parents and children. That work was written too exclusively from the parental point of view; the person who composed it did not get a few children to come in and help him....

"If a new edition of the work is ever required I should like to introduce a few words insisting on the duty of seeking all reasonable pleasure and avoiding all pain that can be honourably avoided. I should like to see children taught that they should not say they like things which they do not like merely because certain other people say they like them, and how foolish it is to say they believe this or that when they understand nothing about it."

SAMUEL BUTLER.

"Education, as deliberate moulding of people into set forms, is sterile, illegitimate, and impossible."

TOLSTOI.

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

Few novelists, if any, can have escaped the sprightly idiocy of a reproach couched in somewhat the following terms:

"Aha! I recognized the people in your last book. You can't deceive ME! The minute I came to that part about the old lady feeding the cat, I saw at once that you meant it for poor Aunt Jane."

And also, spoken several semi-tones lower:

"All the same, it seems rather a shame to have put poor old GRANDPAPA into a book, now that he's dead."

In an endeavour to forestall these intelligent criticisms, I wish to point out that Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe, Miss Melody, Aunt Clotilde, the Hardinges, etc., merely represent types—that I fear to be far from extinct—of amateur educationalists.

There are no individual indictments in HUMBUG, the book is not an autobiography, and Lily Stellenthorpe is not an attempt at foisting upon the reader a portrait of the writer as she would fain have herself considered, and as she is not.

E. M. DELAFIELD.

HUMBUG

Good women know by instinct that the younger generation, more especially when nearly related to themselves, should be equipped to encounter life by the careful and systematic misrepresentation of the more vital aspects of life.

The mother of Lily and Yvonne Stellenthorpe was a good woman, and had all a good woman's capacity for the falsification of moral values. Her husband was so constituted that it would not be unjust to describe him in identical terms.

Lily was so pretty that she did not begin to disappoint her parents seriously until she was seven years old, but Yvonne, who was not pretty and who displayed many less negative disadvantages as well, was a source of dismay to them from her very infancy, when she nearly died of water on the brain.

"Is little Vonnie quite like other children, I sometimes wonder?" fearfully whispered Eleanor Stellenthorpe to her husband, when Yvonne was five years old. And Philip Stellenthorpe, with that entire refusal to acknowledge even the possibility of any painful contingency so wholly characteristic of the sentimental, replied, also in a whisper:

"Hush, my dearest! I can't bear to hear you say a thing like that."

Accordingly nothing of the sort was ever said again, although it became perfectly obvious, in the course of another year or two, that Vonnie was "not quite like other children"—was, in fact, very, very slightly deficient mentally.

She was a quiet little girl, who could be intensely obstinate, with a hesitation in her always unready speech that hardly amounted to an impediment. She was tall and healthy looking, so that one scarcely realized her head to be too large, as it certainly was, for her body.

Little Lily loved Yvonne, her senior by two years, with the fierce, protective passion of a mother for a helpless child. It was a love that caused her the most acute suffering of which a sensitive and highly-strung child is capable, and the manifestations of which were sorrowfully described by her parents, in all good faith, as Lily's naughtiness, and tendency to impertinent interference.

It was naughty to rage and cry when Vonnie was punished for being obstinate or slow, it was impertinent to stamp and shout: "It's not fair! It's not fair!" when Vonnie was left at home, and Father and Mother were kind enough to take Lily out for a treat, such as a neighbouring garden-party, or a wedding, and it was naughtiest of all, when Vonnie was laughed at or admonished for not understanding things quickly, to interfere and cry out: "She can't help it—she is trying—it isn't fair to scold her!"

Lily knew that all these things were naughty, because she had always been told so, but the spirit of frenzy that possessed her always drove her on, the consciousness of naughtiness notwithstanding. Therefore at a very early age there was implanted in her the conviction that she had been sent into the world with a natural proclivity towards wrong-doing.

Both children knew that Lily was their parents' favourite. It would have been impossible not to know it. She might be sorrowfully reproached for her "disloyalty"—a favourite accusation—to the cardinal article of belief that Father and Mother always knew best, but she was never punished. Her prettiness and her precocious cleverness were exploited and praised to her face. She was sent for to the drawing-room whenever there were visitors, and taken out in the carriage to pay calls, and very often given small, unexpected presents and surprises by her mother, in which Vonnie's only share was to be told that "next time" it would be her turn.

It never was her turn, and Lily and Vonnie both knew that the "next time" of the promises would never come.

Paradoxically, it was far harder upon Lily than upon Vonnie. She had the greater capacity for suffering of the two, and a strong abstract sense of justice besides, that rendered her absolutely incapable of accepting uncritically an unfair situation. In addition, the ardour of her love for Vonnie was proportionate to the intensity of all her emotions.

Theoretically, one loved Father and Mother best of everybody in the world. In fact, it would have been a "disloyalty" of the very naughtiest kind to contemplate any other possibility. It was proper to love one's sister third in order, and Lily and Vonnie were both persuaded that to these regulations they must and did conform. Lily, at seven years old, naturally did not seek logically to reconcile this doctrine with the strange accesses of rage and rebellion against Father and Mother that seized her so frequently upon Vonnie's behalf.

Vonnie resented nothing, for herself. She was philosophical, humble-minded, and above all desirous of peace. The nursery storms raised by Lily in her defence were her chief source of grievance. She did not mind being left out of treats, very much. She minded the noise of Lily's angry screams, and Mother's argumentative reproaches, and the final grieved intervention of Father, very much more.

Fortunately, perhaps, for her peace, Vonnie very often failed to realize that it was her own inoffensive self that was the cause of these terrible domestic cataclysms.

She was absent-minded, and never much interested in what people were saying, so that very often the beginning of disturbance went quite unheard by her. Sometimes she only woke up to what was happening when Lily had begun to scream, as she always did sooner or later when her furious gusts of temper outran her powers of verbal expression.

Then Vonnie would think wearily: "Another scene!" which was what she always called a disturbance of any kind, and put her hands to her head, through which each one of Lily's shrieks sent a dull pain jarring. It made her feel rather sick in a curious sort of way, to see Lily shaking all over, the tears streaming down her scarlet cheeks, and Mother, as pale as Lily was crimson, with miserable eyes and a face that almost implored her to be good.

"My pet, how can you be so naughty? Can't you trust Mother to know what's best for both her babies?"

"It's not fair, it's not fair!" shrieked Lily as she had been shrieking for the last five minutes.

"Stop saying that, Lily. It's not true, it's very naughty. Don't you know that Mother would never do anything that wasn't fair?"

"Let—Vonnie—come—too," Lily sobbed more quietly.

"My little darling, leave Vonnie to me. You must learn not to interfere with Vonnie. It will be her turn next time. Besides, Vonnie doesn't want to go, do you, Vonnie my pet?"

"No, Mother," said Vonnie, watching her mother's face and only desirous of saying what would most quickly conduce to peace.

"You see, Lily! As though Mother didn't know what was best for her little Vonnie."

"She always says she doesn't want to go! It's not fair!..."

Lily had begun again, more frantically than ever. Father had to be sent for.

Father took up a high line at once. "My little Lily!" said he gravely. He firmly placed his little Lily upon his knee, a post of honour reserved exclusively for moments of serious appeal and which, even at the height of her frenzy, Lily would never have thought it possible to decline.

"My little Lily! Is this the way you show your gratitude, when an outing is planned for you? Don't you know that you are grieving us very much, when we are only thinking of your welfare and pleasure, and wanting to make you happy? God will be very angry with you, if you can't show a happy, grateful spirit."

Father and Mother were never angry—they were only grieved. It was God that was always indignant and resentful on their behalf.

Lily was afraid of God, and secretly thought that He, who knew everything and could do everything, always punished her naughtiness by sending the thing that she dreaded most in all the world—one of Vonnie's fearful earaches.

The assurance that God was angry again made her choke down some of her defiant sobs and mutterings.

"We might all be so happy, if you were a good little girl, and it ought to be so easy with parents who love you dearly. Many poor little children have no father and mother or nice, cheerful, happy home. Now, my pet, are you sorry?"

"Yes," said Lily tremulously, thinking of God with the earache bolt still, as it were, suspended.

"Then I think you had better ask God to forgive you. Go and kiss your dear mother, and then run and get dressed. Don't keep the carriage waiting."

God, and Philip Stellenthorpe's magnanimity, had defeated Lily.

She crept away, dragging her feet.

Her head ached and her eyes smarted and, dressed up in her white silk frock and best hat, precociously sensitive to the contrast, she had to leave Vonnie in everyday clothes and nursery pinafore, a forlorn figure at the window, and take her seat between her parents in the open carriage.

As they drove, she heard them exchange comments over her head, as they very often did, in slightly lowered tones.

"Her poor little eyes are quite swollen——"

"Poor little thing!"

They always forgave her quickly, like that, however frightful her offence.

Would that God had been equally unresentful! All through the unappreciated afternoon, Lily was secretly addressing earnest, spasmodic appeals to that unappeasable Avenger.

"Don't make Vonnie have earache—not this time!... I did stop screaming at the end—I am sorry—I never, never mean to be naughty again. Oh, don't make Vonnie have earache—give me any other punishment—(but of course He won't, because He knows that nothing else makes me half so miserable—) If only Vonnie doesn't have earache this time, I promise I'll never be naughty again as long as I live—"

"Have you enjoyed yourself, my pet?"

"Yes, Mother."

It would have been naughty not to enjoy oneself when Father and Mother had given one a treat, and quite unthinkable actually to say that one hadn't. As well part at once with the last feeble shred of hope that God would withhold the earache punishment.

Those earaches to which Vonnie was periodically a victim were like the shadow of some monstrous nightmare, for ever hanging over Lily's head. The perpetual foreboding of them, which was never altogether absent from her, darkened her childish days, but when the nightmare was actually upon her, the foreboding realized, Lily knew the meaning of anguish.

Her tiny impotence would hurl itself against the cruel facts of Vonnie's pain, Vonnie's speechless and stoical acceptance of it, worst of all, the philosophic unconcern of the surrounding grown-up people. Because Vonnie never cried, never complained, would say "Nothing is the matter" to all their enquiries, they would not see.

They were not really sufficiently interested to see.

When Lily had toothache—really a very little toothache—and tentatively said so, her mother petted her additionally, asking her continually if the tooth was hurting less, and giving her a story-book in the drawing-room at lesson time. She came into the night nursery with a carefully shaded light in her hand, in the middle of the night, and woke Lily up by putting a little plate with some grapes on it at her bedside. All of which was very pleasant, and Lily was quite sorry when next day it proved impossible, with any vestige of truth, to assert that the tooth was still aching.

But if anything hurt Vonnie, she would never say so. Lily knew this, but nobody else seemed to realize it. In the same way, Lily, by some mysterious instinct that she could not have analyzed, always knew by some quite indescribable look around Vonnie's eyes, when anything was the matter with her. She even knew, and the knowledge made her so miserable that she felt as though she could not bear it, that Vonnie sometimes tried to shut her away, too, and would rather that she had not known so much and so unerringly.

Vonnie's reticence was appalling. She would have suffered tortures, rather than risk a possible scene by complaining. She could only just bear Lily's piercing watchfulness so long as it found no vent in words.

On the earache days, and, worst of all, nights, both were at a pitch of strain that amounted to acute nervous tension and each reacted upon the other.

An east wind gave Vonnie earache. So did sitting in a draught, or staying out of doors late when it was damp, or sometimes just catching an ordinary cold in the head. Lily knew all this. A familiar sensation to her was that of a sudden sinking, a physical sickness that only lasted for a few seconds, when some grown-up authority observed carelessly in her hearing:

"Why, the wind has gone right round to the east to-day."

Once Lily had put her apprehension into words and said, breathless from misery:

"Then Vonnie will get earache!"

"What!

'When the wind is in the east

It's neither good for man nor beast!'"

her father made playful quotation.

But when Lily, frightened and resentful that she was not being taken seriously, repeated angrily: "But she will get earache—she always does, if there's an east wind," her father spoke gravely.

"Come, come, my pet. I don't like to hear you say things like that. That's not being a very good little girl, you know. It's only gloomy, ungrateful little people who run to meet trouble halfway. Little Vonnie doesn't mean to get earache. Do you, Vonnie?"

"Yes, Father—I mean no," said Vonnie vaguely.

She went out and she did get earache. Lily had always known that she would.

Yet Lily, from that day added to her store of small, perverted convictions, the unescapable conclusion that it was very naughty to foresee calamity, and still naughtier to voice that foresight.

She still sometimes said to the nurse, or to the daily governess: "Vonnie's got a cold already. She'll have earache if she goes out to-day." The words seemed forced from her in a frail hope that would not be denied, that the catastrophe might be averted.

But the nurse simply said: "Will you learn to mind your own business, Miss Lily? I should hope I know what was good for Miss Vonnie by this time, without any interference from you."

And the governess said bracingly: "Oh, I don't think Vonnie's got much of a cold, have you, dear?"

To which Vonnie, of course, said No, just as she would have said there was nothing the matter, if earache had actually been upon her.

"There, you see, Lily! You really must give up always trying to speak for Vonnie instead of letting her speak for herself. It's not good for her, and it's not good for you. What will you do when you're both grown up?" said Miss Cleeve humorously, "if you're at a ball, let us say, and some gentleman asks Vonnie to dance, and then you, Lily, answer instead of her and say 'Oh no, thank you very much, she's tired.' Wouldn't that make you both look very silly, don't you think?"

Lily was no match for Miss Cleeve's ridicule. She could think of no confutation of this reductio ad absurdum of the situation, even in her own mind. She merely hated Miss Cleeve vehemently, and put her for ever into the large class of people who "didn't understand."

These were indeed legion, where was concerned the most vital preoccupation of Lily's whole being—Vonnie's welfare.

When an earache pain had actually begun, which it did almost always in the evening, not the day-time—and Lily knew by the look on Vonnie's face that it was still quite endurable, there was a faint hope that if she went to bed quickly and pulled the blankets over her head, she might go to sleep before it became really bad.

But Vonnie would not, and Lily dared not, utter a word of this to the authorities, and consequently the half-hour spent in the drawing-room with Father and Mother before bedtime underwent no curtailment, on such occasions.

They played Happy Families, or Beggar-my-Neighbour, or listened to Father reading aloud, just as usual.

And all the time Lily, in an agony, was inwardly adjuring the Being to whom she believed all her misery to be directly attributable.

"Let them send us to bed soon—don't let her be bad to-night—oh, do make them send us to bed to-night—now at once. Let her go to sleep before it gets bad—I'll be so good if only You'll make them send us to bed at once before it gets bad——"

On one such evening, when Philip Stellenthorpe saw Lily's eyes fixed upon him, and her lips moving, as he thought, in earnest attention to his reading, he paused as he was about to close the book.

"What about an extra quarter of an hour, just for once?" he enquired benevolently. "It's almost too exciting to leave off here, don't you think, little Lily?"

He never really quite believed that poor little Vonnie, who never spoke, could follow the thread of any story, although he would have been much shocked if anybody had ever put such a thought into words.

And Lily, unforgettably, appallingly conscious of her own departure from sacred tradition, gratitude and everything else to be accounted for righteousness, said in a voice that sounded loud and strained: "Please, I'd rather we went to bed now."

There was a dreadful silence.

The kind smile abruptly vanished from Philip's face altogether, and he shut up the book as though he could never bear to open it again, and put it away from him almost with horror.

Eleanor Stellenthorpe looked stricken.

"Run along, my pets," she said in the accustomed formula, but in an inward voice that suggested restrained suffering.

She received Vonnie's kiss automatically, as she always did, but when Lily put her arms round her mother's neck, fearful of omitting the customary hug that she knew was always expected of her, Eleanor released herself gently. Slowly bowing her head, she at the same time raised her eyes and fixed them sorrowfully upon Lily's face, producing an extraordinarily poignant effect of silent reproach.

Philip kissed Lily once upon the forehead, instead of as usual, two or three times all over her face and said deeply:

"My poor little child! Good-night."

Lily went upstairs in tears, indescribably guilty.

She had been naughty again, and oh! how like God it was, to have arranged things like that. If Vonnie didn't get to bed and to sleep before the earache gained its hold, then they must both suffer through one of those black nights of misery that Lily so dreaded. But when one was asked whether one preferred to go straight to bed, or to sit up while Father was kind enough to read aloud, it was naughty and ungrateful to choose bed. So that God, having thus trapped one into naughtiness, was there all ready with His favourite punishment—the thing that He knew she dreaded most of all the punishments in the world—Vonnie's earache.

That night, the hand of God, as Lily saw it, was even heavier than usual. Vonnie's earache was agonizing.

Lily knew this, in the darkness of the night nursery, from the tiny, stifled moans that came from Vonnie's bed. Not a sound ever escaped her until the pain was almost unbearable, and even then Lily knew that she would never utter a spoken word, because the children were forbidden to speak after the light was put out.

Lily herself lay stiff and rigid in her bed, her hands clenched, her body quivering and sweating, with every faculty strained to its utmost in the intensity of her tortured listening. Each time that Vonnie's almost inaudible moan sounded, a pang went through Lily's whole frame. Every now and then she would discover that she was holding her breath, and find herself constrained to exhale it in a long, quivering, noiseless sob.

From time to time when the little moaning sound had not at once recurred after the brief interval of silence by which it was usually succeeded, a sick hope invaded Lily that Vonnie might after all be dropping off to sleep. But, redoubling the intensity of her own listening, she could hear sobbing, irregular breathing from Vonnie that shook her with a fresh despair.

"Vonnie!" she whispered.

No answer.

"Oh, Vonnie, is it very bad?"

"No," came the faintest of whispers in reply.

It was not true, Lily knew perfectly well, and she knew also that very likely next day Vonnie would deliberately go and confess to their mother that she had been disobedient and talked, after the light had been put out in the night nursery.

She would say nothing about her earache, nothing to excuse herself, nothing to incriminate Lily, and would accept rebuke or punishment quite speechlessly. Lily knew that Vonnie always craved any form of penalty that would ease her conscience of the imaginary burdens with which she was eternally loading it. But no one else understood this.

Presently a shaft of moonlight crept through the curtained window, and Lily sat up in bed. Then she saw, with a shock that made her feel sick, that Vonnie was sitting bolt upright, not lying down at all. Her small pillow was put up on end behind her and inadequately supported her shoulders, and both hands clasped her temples.

As a rule, Vonnie lay down on the side that wasn't hurting her, and kept both hands over her bad ear. Lily had never seen her sitting up like this before and it seemed to deny any hope of her ever being able to go to sleep at all.

"Oh, let me fetch Nurse," sobbed Lily, shaking from head to foot.

Vonnie shook her head very slightly in obstinate negative, and the movement forced a gasping sound of pain from her.

It was always the same thing.

Vonnie would not tell about her earache when it began because she was afraid of a fuss, and she would not tell about it afterwards for fear of being scolded because she had not "said" sooner. If Lily told instead of her, then it was naughty and interfering, and very likely disbelieved besides, in the face of Vonnie's stoical denials. There was no hope anywhere, and the awful night would never, never end.

Lily sat up too, because it was impossible to lie down while Vonnie crouched there, racked with pain; and tense, angry appeals that she thought of as prayers, raced through her mind.

"Make her go to sleep—it's nothing to You to send her off to sleep—You can't let her go on like this all night.... It's cruel to punish Vonnie too, as well as me.... Why can't You send the earache to me, when it's me You want to punish?"

But God, who knew everything, would never be taken in by an argument of that sort, however plausible it might have been to the ears of human justice. Lily knew very well that God perfectly understood how, in some strange, naughty way that invariably made the authorities angry, Vonnie's sufferings hurt Lily far more acutely than her own could ever have done. And, of course, He took advantage of His knowledge whenever she had to be punished. Lily had even, sometimes, reflected with a forlorn kind of abstract justice, that this was fair enough. If He didn't so ingeniously choose the very way that hurt most, it wouldn't be a real punishment.

But, within sight and sound of Vonnie's torture to-night, she had no consideration for abstract justice.

She did what she had very seldom done before, and went to fetch the nurse.

Nurse was in bed and, to Lily's astonishment, had not yet gone to sleep.

"Did Miss Vonnie ask you to come for me?" she demanded suspiciously.

Lily had anticipated the question, which was always the preliminary, in the nursery, to an emphatic recommendation to mind her own business and leave Miss Vonnie to mind hers.

"Yes, she did," said Lily, feeling herself choke. God could hardly do much more than He had done already, even to a liar, and everything but present relief had become worthless of consideration.

"Now mind, if you've got me out of bed for nothing——" said Nurse threateningly. But she spoke in quite a kind voice, and put on her dressing-gown, and lit a candle. "Good gracious, child, why are you so white?" she asked Lily and took her hand protectingly and held it all the way to the night nursery.

Vonnie's moans were much louder now, and Lily, looking up anxiously at Nurse, felt that she must, for once, accept Vonnie's illness at its own valuation, and not at the slighting one that Vonnie herself would fain give to it.

"Now then, Miss Vonnie dear, what's all this?"

Nurse took Vonnie's hands down from her head. The odd look round Vonnie's eyes that had been so nearly imperceptible early in the evening had deepened in a very strange way, and after one glance at her small, leaden-coloured face, Nurse's manner changed altogether.

She went to the little medicine-cupboard high up on the wall, and lit the spirit-lamp, and heated water and put into it some sweet-smelling oil out of a green bottle. She put Vonnie's dressing-gown round her and a large shawl over that, and sat down in a low chair and took Vonnie on to her lap. Then she dipped some cotton-wool into the warm oil and put it into each ear, and all the time she was coaxing and pitying Vonnie with kind, soothing words.

Lily never forgot the exquisite ecstasy of relief with which she watched and heard it all from her own bed in the corner. The violent reaction from her state of nervous anguish was so great that she began to cry and sob quite quietly, scarcely knowing that she was doing so.

Vonnie's moaning ceased almost at once, and her whole attitude relaxed, and presently Nurse got up and put her gently down in the low chair, with a pillow behind her.

"I shall be back directly," she whispered reassuringly to Lily, opening the door very softly.

She came back with their mother.

"She's dropped off now. I expect she'll sleep, poor little thing—she's worn out with the pain," said Nurse as they looked down at unconscious Vonnie.

"Poor child! Well, Nurse, if you'll move in here for to-night, I'll take Miss Lily into my room."

"Going to sleep with Mother" was a treat. Lily knew very well that if she had been the one to be ill, she would have been moved into her mother's room long since.

But nothing mattered, now that Vonnie was sleeping peacefully, and being taken care of by a kind, omnipotent grown-up person.

When Lily was lying snugly between the soft, scented sheets in her mother's enormous bed, with the pale pink quilt spread across it, her mother came and knelt beside her and put her arms round her.

"Go to sleep quickly, my pet. I shall be in bed directly. I've only got to take off my dressing-gown. Settle down comfily, now."

A delicious, drowsy feeling invaded Lily, and she turned over obediently on her side.

"Why, my poor chicken, you've been crying! There's nothing for you to cry about. Did you have a bad dream?"

"Vonnie had earache," murmured Lily, half asleep, and heard without surprise her mother's amused, uncomprehending laugh and answer:

"Why, you silly little goose, it was poor Vonnie who had earache, not you! There was nothing for you to cry about! You must have been dreaming."

Lily never knew whether the night that she had fetched Nurse to come to Vonnie had witnessed the culminating episode in that series of giant nightmares, Vonnie's earaches—or whether it only stood out in her memory from the acute sensation of exquisite relief that it had finally afforded her.

At all events, it was after one of the earache nights that a dreadful thought first came to her.

What a good thing it would be if Vonnie were to die! Lily was horrified at her own wickedness, but dwelt upon this solution with a sort of unwilling fascination.

She knew instinctively that Vonnie would never grow up like other people—would never be able either to take care of herself, or to find people who would take care of her. She would never be very happy, she would always have earache, and be left out of treats, and chidden for being so slow.

Whereas, if Vonnie died, there was an end of earache, of scoldings, of everything that was unkind or unfair. She would go to Heaven, where everybody was perfectly happy for ever, and Lily herself would never mind anything again, if once she knew for certain that Vonnie was happy and taken care of, even though out of sight. It seemed a very simple solution, although God, to say nothing of Father and Mother, would certainly be very angry with her for thinking of such a thing.

Lily, affrighted, put the idea away from her, although it came back again when she once overheard Aunt Clo emphatically remarking that Vonnie would certainly never live to grow up.

Lily did not know of the devastating effect produced by Aunt Clo's unsolicited pronouncement.

"That child won't live to grow up," said Miss Clotilde Stellenthorpe defiantly.

"Good heavens, Clo, what a thing to say in front of her own mother!"

Eleanor was half indignant and half tearful.

"Mark my words," said Aunt Clo inexorably.

Her brother Philip looked at her in pained rebuke.

"I don't like to hear you say a thing like that, Clo. It's—it's heartless. Poor little Vonnie!"

"But no! There is nothing heartless about it. You and Eleanor refuse to face facts, my poor Philip. Why, you have only to look at Vonnie to see that she isn't——"

Philip winced so painfully, holding up his hand as though in protest, that she broke off.

"But just compare her with Lily, who is two years younger! Look at the way Lily chatters, and the too, too precocious things she says, and the way she can read and play her little pieces on the piano! Not that I approve of the way you exploit the child, my Eleanor. It's very bad for her, alas! and I can see that she thinks herself tremendously superior to poor little Vonnie, always left out of everything."

"We have always been devoted to both our little children, Clo," said Philip gravely. "It may be rather a temptation to take Lily about with us more than is quite good for her—she is a very pretty little mite, and one likes to hear her chatter, and to make her happy. But we love both our dear little girls equally, as they know very well."

It was perfectly true that the dear little girls had, at least, often been told that this was so, and neither Philip nor his wife ever admitted the possibility that their children might have come to draw other conclusions for themselves.

"Vonnie doesn't really enjoy being taken about. I've made a few little experiments with her, quite often, and they've never been a great success," observed Eleanor.

Her idolatry of her younger child had given her occasional moments of insight and she did not possess to the full her husband's monumental capacity for evading the acknowledgment of painful or unpleasant facts. A wistful desire for self-justification sometimes possessed her, and a complete absence of judgment led her to ask it from the quarter in which she was least likely to receive it.

"Why do you say things like that, Clo dear? Vonnie is very happy and well taken care of in the nursery. You don't think there's any jealousy between them?"

"I can hardly credit that Vonnie likes seeing her younger sister always preferred to herself," said Aunt Clo, shrugging her shoulders. "It would scarcely be human nature."

She was merely making application of a rule that she supposed to be general, to a particular case of which she knew nothing.

Vonnie had never in her life been jealous of Lily's privileges—and Lily herself bitterly resented them.

But Aunt Clo, who so scornfully accused her brother and sister-in-law of refusing to face facts, was quite determined that Vonnie was jealous because she was neglected, and that Lily was complacently ready to rob her sister of her rights as eldest.

Even Aunt Clo, however, never in so many words said that Vonnie's intellect was in any way feeble. She only continued to repeat that the child would most certainly never live to grow up, and since neither Eleanor nor Philip would conceivably have allowed, even in their inmost thoughts, that to die might prove very much easier for Vonnie than to live, Miss Stellenthorpe was not again asked to stay with them.

There was no break, or open quarrel—an open quarrel with Philip Stellenthorpe would have been a sheer impossibility—and the nearest that Philip ever allowed himself to go to an analysis of the disagreeable situation was to say to his wife:

"Poor Clo isn't very sympathetic in her manner, especially on subjects she doesn't quite understand, like the bringing-up of children. Perhaps, dear, we'll wait a little while before having her here again."

Eleanor understood, and the little while became of quite indefinite duration, without anybody's having to put a distressing resolution into painful words.

As it would have been "disloyal" to admit that a near relation could be anything but loved and admired, Lily and Vonnie were only told, as was indeed the truth, that Aunt Clo lived a great deal abroad. Lily, observant and critical, could, however, perfectly well have told the date at which Father and Mother began always to speak of her absent relative as "your poor Aunt Clo"—and the adjective was to her perfectly indicative of some obscure condemnation.

Lily had intuitions about the grown-up people about her, especially her father and mother, of which they appeared to be quite unaware.

She knew that something, or someone, had made them at last realize that Vonnie's slowness and her rather inarticulate way of speaking were not so many manifestations of naughtiness on her part. They would have preferred it, Lily concluded, if these things had been naughtiness. In some incomprehensible way, they resented having to be anxious about Vonnie.

Sometimes, when Mother spoke to Vonnie sharply for the second or third time and Vonnie only looked at her dumbly with that scared, bewildered gaze which meant that she had not been "paying attention," Father and Mother would exchange a look that Lily indefinably resented.

Then Mother would compress her lips, as though exercising great control over herself, and turn away without speaking.

And Father sometimes said, in that grave, gentle voice which both children perfectly well knew to mean profound vexation:

"Run away and play, little Vonnie. You needn't stay in the drawing-room any more. My Lily can come and look at pictures, if she likes. You can trot off and enjoy yourself in the nursery."

Lily never dared to ask whether she might go to the nursery too, although she knew that Vonnie, humiliated and dejected by these kind words which she was supposed to accept unquestioningly at their spoken value, would only sit by herself on the nursery oil-cloth, quite still, slowly tracing patterns with her finger on the floor. If Lily had been with her, they would have played their own private games with the dolls or the marbles, and have been happy together.

But Lily had, instead, to accept her own undesired privileges, and even before she was nine years old, it had grown to be a moral impossibility for her to brave her parents' shocked grief and disappointment by displaying to them that ungracious candour which they would have felt to be ungrateful disloyalty.

This moral cowardice Lily, inevitably, grew to look upon as righteousness.

She was conforming to the standard set before her.

It was not a very wide-embracing standard, but it was a very unyielding one. It gave one to understand, without adducing any reason or explanation for its arbitrary condemnations, that certain things constituted naughtiness. Chief amongst these, of course, was the crime of "disloyalty," which equally comprised any implied distrust—a spoken one was out of the question—of any opinion, decision, act, word, or deed emanating from Father or Mother, and the ungraciousness of admitting to possible disappointment or fatigue when taken anywhere by Father or Mother. Sometimes, on such an occasion, one of them might enquire of Lily: "Are you tired, my pet?" and in some mysterious way it was not telling a story to reply joyfully: "Oh, no, not a bit!" instead of saying, as was probably the case, "Oh, yes, I am!" It was only doing what was expected of one, and anything else would have been "disloyal."

Telling stories, however, was most undoubtedly a form of naughtiness in any other connection. Lily knew, and was often told, that she was an untruthful child. The accusation was entirely deserved, and as no distinction was ever drawn between the casual untruthfulness of any sensitive and imaginative child, and the fundamental insincerity of a mentally dishonest one, Lily remained persuaded that she was of an incurably deceitful disposition.

She was always profoundly ashamed when she had told a lie, which she often did when she wanted to draw attention to herself or to make people believe her of some great importance or merit.

But she was not really exhilarated or proud of herself, although she tried to persuade herself that she was, when her mother or the governess praised her for confessing to some breakage, or piece of accidental mischief.

"That's a brave little girl, to be honest!" and "No one is ever punished who tells the truth at once."

Lily could not feel that she had really been very brave or very honest. That wasn't the sort of thing about which it would ever have occurred to her to tell a lie. She knew perfectly well that she was never punished on account of even careless damage, and there was a sort of lurking self-importance that was far from unpleasant, in making elaborate confession of the misdeed, with an artistic display of all the shame and nervousness that she was supposed to be enduring.

It was, in fact, rather like being praised for not crying at the dentist. Mere vanity was entirely responsible for Lily's courage on such occasions, and a desire to be told how brave she was. It would have mortified her self-esteem acutely, had she shed tears. However, she was always greatly praised for being so courageous, whereas nothing much was ever said about Vonnie's endurance, because Vonnie always remarked stolidly on receipt of the customary sixpence: "But it didn't hurt me much, and I didn't want to cry!"

Lily would have been incapable of so belittling her own achievement, but she was capable of a genuine appreciation, and even generous envy, for Vonnie's conscientiousness—which was more than Eleanor Stellenthorpe was. Such an ungracious reception of the parental praises and sixpences very nearly amounted to disloyalty, in her unexpressed opinion.

Her disapprobation was only felt by her children—it was seldom put into words.

Philip Stellenthorpe and anything in the nature of "scoldings" were unthinkable under the same roof, and Eleanor intensely disliked the system of punishment by which her own childhood had been made miserable.

Neither realized in the slightest degree that the atmosphere of oppressive disapproval and hurt feeling which they contrived wordlessly to diffuse whenever their children fell short of the ideal formed for them, caused infinitely greater suffering to both than the severest punishment would have done.

Occasionally, when Lily fell into one of the tempestuous crying fits sorrowfully alluded to as "temper," and entirely unrecognized as the inevitable concomitant of a highly wrought nervous organization forced into an unnatural condition of life, Eleanor would talk to her long and seriously. She was afraid that her little Lily had a morbid disposition.

"What is morbid?"

Grievance-making. Did Lily realize what an extraordinarily happy little girl she ought to be? Yes—Lily, sobbing and crying in an access of uncontrollable misery, did know how very, very happy she ought to be—truly she did. Everything in the world to make her happy, her mother sadly repeated. Then she told Lily something about her own childish days.

Things had been very different for her. Grandpapa was very strict with all his children, and Grandmamma thought nothing of giving her daughter a good whipping from time to time. How would Lily like to be shut up in her bedroom on bread and water, after receiving a hearty box on the ears, because she could not say her Duty to her Neighbour?

"Never," said Eleanor emphatically, "never have I laid a finger upon either of you."

The stories of Grandpapa's severity were terrible, and so far removed from anything in Lily's experience was his system of blows and deprivations that sometimes, in the depths of her heart, she found herself wondering if all the stories could be perfectly true?

She stifled the disloyal thought, suppressing it. Suppression was in fact the only recognized method for dealing with any and every form of naughtiness.

It was naughty, obviously, since it was forbidden, for Lily and Yvonne to buy sweets.

"You don't want to spend your money on nasty, cheap sweets, my dear children" was Philip's fashion of discouraging a propensity to which he himself happened never to have been liable.

Yvonne and Lily did want to spend their money on buying the sweets very often, but they were successfully debarred from doing so by the unpleasant conviction that the wish, for some quite unexplained reason, was something degrading and to be concealed with shame.

Even expensive chocolates, occasionally bestowed by visitors, were kept in the drawing-room and decorously handed round after tea when the children came downstairs.

"Don't they want to take them upstairs and finish the box in the nursery?" jovial Cousin Charlie Hardinge had once enquired, looking on with surprise.

"Oh dear no, this is quite an old-established custom. They like this way of doing it, don't you, Lily my pet?"

"Yes," said Lily, smiling happily.

She was far too responsive not to know instinctively just how terribly hurt and disconcerted Father and Mother would have been if she had answered otherwise.

Vonnie was at once less intuitive and more honest. But then she was very seldom appealed to, and even when both were impartially addressed, it was always Lily who made reply, partly from the old instinct of safeguarding Vonnie. It was so certain that Vonnie would blindly sacrifice Father's and Mother's feelings to her own truthfulness, and find herself in tacit disgrace thereby!

Lily herself seldom made such mistakes, although one or two terrible lapses stood out in her memory for years, as being amongst the worst and most devastating naughtinesses of a childhood that was perpetually haunted by a sense of uncomprehended sin.

There was the time when she had suddenly, and most disastrously, found courage to protest against the appellation of "little pet," that was bestowed upon her, so she considered, in and out of season.

"I'm not so very little," said Lily at nine years old, "and I'm not a pet when I'm being naughty. You say 'my little pet' even when you're scolding me."

"Lily! When did I ever scold you?"

Eleanor's tone was heart-rending, and she entirely disregarded the point at issue.

Not so her husband, frowning heavily.

"That's not at all a good way of talking," said he—and very nearly added, "my little pet." The consciousness of checking himself gave an additional force to his pained tones. "You will always be our little Lily, and God has given you kind and loving parents, and you are insulting Him when you jeer like that at things which ought to be sacred to you."

The magnitude of the indictment, no less than the sorrowful silence maintained for the rest of the evening by both her parents, reduced Lily to tears and a sense of crushing disgrace.

Things were always worse when God became involved in them—and besides, there was the earache menace if He grew angry.

But in that respect, God had stayed His hand of late. Lily, however, put no confidence in this forbearance, and felt herself thoroughly justified of her distrust when, quite suddenly, Vonnie fell ill.

At first, there was no such prolonged misery involved in this calamity as in one of the dreaded earache nights, and Lily was more surprised and gratified than rendered anxious, when Vonnie's bed was taken out of the night nursery and placed in the dressing-room adjoining Mother's room, whilst Father and his bed went away into the Blue Room.

She spent a whole Sunday afternoon with Vonnie, and they played a long, quiet, interminable game, involving the recital of low-voiced and mysterious stories by Lily, and sleepy, pleased acquiescent nods and murmurs from Vonnie. She did not seem very ill, and Lily was allowed to kiss her, which was usually forbidden in times of illness because "it might be catching."

"Good-night, Vonnie. We'll play some more to-morrow."

"Oh yes, I shall be quite well to-morrow."

They kissed one another.

When to-morrow came, however, Lily learnt, for the most part indirectly from the servants' talk amongst themselves, that Vonnie had become much worse during the night. The doctor had actually been sent for before breakfast.

"Has she got earache?" asked Lily, feeling very much frightened and voicing the deepest fear that she knew.

"You run along, Miss Lily, and don't ask questions," said the parlour-maid. "Your Mamma particularly said as no one was to frighten you."

As usual, Eleanor, solicitously guarding her darling from others, had made no allowance for Lily's powers of either induction or imagination.

Miss Cleeve came as usual, but she sent Lily out of the room while she had a short conversation with the housemaid, bringing up some coals.

Lily felt convinced that Clara was telling Miss Cleeve something about Vonnie.

"What's the matter with Vonnie? When can I go and see her?" she asked instantly on being readmitted.

"Dear me, what an imperious little person this is!" said Miss Cleeve very brightly indeed. "Gently, gently, Lily, if you please. If you do your lessons very nicely and are a good little girl, perhaps you'll go and see Vonnie later on. We shall see."

Miss Cleeve looked very wise and very decided, and Lily distrusted her violently.

"Why haven't I seen Mother this morning?"

"She's busy, dear."

"But Nurse is with Vonnie too. Is Vonnie so very, very ill?"

"Ha, ha!" said Miss Cleeve with a laugh that rang singularly untrue. "What a silly little girl to talk like that, now! Come and sit down, and you shall choose which lesson you'd like to begin with, for a treat."

Miss Cleeve's brightness and Miss Cleeve's treats inspired Lily with a sickening sense of fear.

She was kept in the schoolroom all the morning, and when she and Miss Cleeve went downstairs to luncheon, Miss Cleeve held her hand with unnecessary tightness all the way. But Lily was alert, and she saw the doctor's little carriage going away down the drive from the window of the hall, and she also saw her mother standing, with head uncovered at the front door, and her mother did not look at all as usual.

Lily wrenched her hand away from Miss Cleeve's and ran to her.

"Can't I see Vonnie?" she cried urgently.

Her mother kissed her silently.

"I hope——?" said Miss Cleeve hesitatingly.

There was an interchange of glances between the two grown women that the child's strained, anxious gaze sought desperately to interpret.

"Is Vonnie very ill, Mother?"

"There's nothing for you to worry your little self about, my darling," said Eleanor in a soothing voice, kissing her again.

A choking sense of her own impotence, resentment at their futile evasions, and above all a growing horror of all this mystery, made Lily burst into loud, unrestrained crying.

"Hush!" cried Miss Cleeve sharply, pulling her into the dining-room.

"Lily, Lily," said her mother. "Oh don't, my little pet."

She sank into a chair, looking overwhelmed.

"My dear child," said her father, suddenly emerging from the embrasure of the dining-room window, "you mustn't add to your mother's troubles just now. You must be a good little girl, and not think of yourself at all. Do your little lessons, and play about in the sunshine, and don't give any trouble, but be a good, happy little child."

It all sounded very kind and easy. The flood of misery that overwhelmed one must be some form of obscure, but extreme, naughtiness.

Luncheon was eaten almost in silence, and Eleanor went away before it was finished, stroking Lily's long brown hair as she passed behind her chair.

"Play in the garden this afternoon," she whispered, "and Mother will try and come to you in the drawing-room after tea."

Then a telegram was brought in and Philip, after reading it, said to the parlour-maid:

"The carriage will be wanted to meet the 3.30 train this afternoon. Tell Fowler."

Miss Cleeve looked up and said: "Is it——?" and raised her eyebrows.

"Yes. A second opinion will be a relief to us, though I'm afraid——" He checked himself.

Lily, not daring to glance at them, knew very well that it was because of her that they left all their sentences unfinished.

"——Probably a trained nurse, if he recommends it——" said her father, very low and rapidly.

What was a Train-Nurse?

Miss Cleeve went away, as usual on Saturdays, as soon as lunch was finished, saying warningly to Lily: "Now mind you go and play in the terrace garden as your mother told you. I think I should stay on the nice front terrace all the afternoon, if I were you. It'll be nice and sunny there."

"Yes, Miss Cleeve," said Lily forlornly.

There was probably something to be seen or heard from the other part of the garden, overlooking the drive, that they did not want her to know about.

In spite of this conviction, however, Lily went to the terrace, and looked up at the windows of the room where Vonnie was.

The blinds of both windows were drawn down so as to admit the least possible light into the bedroom and there was nothing to be learnt. Lily went into the potting-shed and sat there in the obscurity and cried.

She heard two of the servants walking down the path outside, as though on their way to the stables, and caught fragmentary words and phrases.... "It's awful—so quick, too."

"That's the way with tumours ... don't you remember me telling you about my poor Aunt Gertie ... just the same way it was——"

"Why, they may have to operate...."