She sees good little well-behaved daughters coming down in "the
children's hour" and receives favourable reports from the governesses,
and has no idea, or even any speculation about what strange and new
thoughts and emotions may be commencing to germinate in their brains.
Mildred has perhaps inherited her father's _volage_ nature where the
other sex are concerned, and early shows tendencies which ought to be
sympathetically checked and directed. Catherine has got a strong touch
of Uncle Billy's unscrupulousness, and is often deceitful and
scheming, with a wonderful aptitude for the nursery dominoes and other
games of chance. But both, taught by Fraulein or Mademoiselle--and
that good old Nurse Timson!--only show their mother their sweetest
side when in her company, and are meek, well-behaved little mice,
influenced to be thus not from any moral conviction--because if that
were so they would be good at all times as well--but swayed by the
certain knowledge of personal physical gain if they make a good
impression upon mother, and certain punishment and unpleasantness from
the governesses if they do not. All goes along smoothly until the
rising sap of nature begins to dominate their lives; then some outward
and visible sign of their inherited tendencies begins to show, the
force causing its expression being stronger for the time than any
other thing.
One of the boys gambles, and goes to the Jews for money. The eldest
son and heir, who has never had the wiles of women revealed and
explained to him, or the temptations which are bound to be thrust upon
him because of his great position in the world pointed out to him,
succumbs to the fascinations and falls into the snares of a cunning
chorus girl. Our good mother and great lady has steadily avoided even
admitting that there can be sex questions in life, and has rigorously
banished all possible discussion of them as not being a subject which
should be talked of in any nice family. She has never given any
especial teaching to arouse pride in his old name in her eldest son,
or impressed the great responsibility there is in the worthy
guardianship of the fine position God has endowed him with. He has
just been allowed to drift with the rest, and, unwarned and unarmed,
has fallen in the first fight with his physical emotions.