difficulty of education,' said Rolfe. 'If I followed
my instincts, I should make the boy unfit for anything but the
quietest, obscurest life. I should make him hate a street, and love the
fields. I should teach him to despise every form of ambition; to shrink
from every kind of pleasure, but the simplest and purest; to think of
life as a long day's ramble, and death as the quiet sleep that comes at
the end of it. I should like him not to marry--never to feel the need
of it; or if marry he must, to have no children. That's my real wish;
and if I tried to carry it out, the chances are that I should do him an
intolerable wrong. For fear of it, I must give him into the hands of
other people; I must see him grow into habits and thoughts which will
cause me perpetual uneasiness; I must watch him drift further and
further away from my own ideal of life, till at length, perhaps, there
is scarce a possibility of sympathy between us.'

'Morbid--all morbid,' remarked the listener.

'I don't know. It may only mean that one sees too clearly the root
facts of existence. I have another mood (less frequent) in which I try
to persuade myself that I don't care much about the child; that his
future doesn't really concern me at all. Why should it? He's just one
of the millions of human beings who come and go. A hundred years
hence--what of him and of me? What can it matter how he lived and how
he died? The best kind of education would be that which hardened his
skin and blunted his sympathies. What right have I to make him
sensitive? The thing is, to get through life with as little suffering
as possible. What monstrous folly to teach him to wince and cry out at
the sufferings of other people! Won't he have enough of his own before
he has done? Yet that's what we shall aim at--to cultivate his
sympathetic emotions, so that the death of a bird shall make him sad,
and the sight of human distress wring his heart. Real kindness would
try to make of him a healthy ruffian, with just enough conscience to
keep him from crime.'

'Theory for theory, I prefer this,' said Morton. 'To a certain extent I
try to act upon it.'

'You do?'

'Just because I know that my own tendency is to over-softness. I have
sometimes surprised my wife by bidding Harry disregard things that
appealed to his pity. You remember what old Hobbes says: "_Homo malus,
puer robustus_"? There was more truth in it in his day than in ours.
It's natural for a boy to be a good dea