The finishing stroke in Ma’s finishing school was the threat to report me to the nice little clergyman. I loved him dearly. Like Old Harris he was an outlet. I was so worked up that I warned Ma that I’d listen to what she told him. Ma said it was a grave pass to be dictated to in her own house by a creature she had brought into the world. She demanded an apology. I refused. If I expressed contrition to Pa all was washed out, but with Ma it was different. She said penitent gush was useless without reform in deeds. Ma was what she called consistent.

The clergyman came next day, and after dinner, when Pa was at the stables feeding his horses, I loitered in the passage to hear what Ma was saying. Sure enough, she was reporting me as an abnormal specimen. I was infuriated, but the clergyman’s voice, in the tone of the Collects—perhaps it was the Twentieth Sunday after the Melbourne Cup—said, “But my dear Mrs. Melvyn, I cannot see anything wrong at all. That child has such glorious eyes that when they are fixed upon me I always find I can preach a better sermon.”

“She can be nice when she wants to.”

“Adolescence is a difficult time. You might let her come with me around the parish and to stay with my wife and daughters till I come next month. During our progress I could find time to talk to her on spiritual things: and I get so tired of driving, and she is such a clever whip.”

That was one in the eye of Ma. I was as gay as a lark, and a willy-wagtail or two thrown in, when serving supper. I awaited breathlessly to hear the results of the clergyman’s championship. Disillusion awaited me.

There was only a thin partition between my bed and Ma’s, and I could always hear Ma’s final injunctions to Pa. Tonight Pa opened the discourse. “Mr. David wants to take Sybylla with him.”

“So he said.” Ma’s voice was a drought of common sense.

“Are you letting her go?”

“I am not.”

“Can’t you spare her?”

“Not to Mr. David.”

“Why?”

“Why should I let her run around with that silly old man?”

“He’s not so silly.”

“All men are silly where there is a young girl.”

“I think you carry suspicion too far,” murmured Pa.

“His cloth doesn’t protect a man from being blind to faults in a girl, though he would be dull to the problems of older women.”

Pa gave a loud grunt. In a little while Ma complained, “I wish you wouldn’t snore so.” Pa hadn’t begun yet, so Ma was taking time by the forelock, as she often adjured me to do.

I lay awake pondering her words. Surely a clergyman, and such a nice lean helpless-looking little one as Mr. David, would not be guilty of flattery or trying to make a fool of me; and he wasn’t a bit like the pretentious Canon, who had once taken Mr. David’s place. Now, if it had been the Canon! I remember chortling when I read the table of consanguinity beginning, “A man may not marry his grandmother,” but Pa had said that human nature was such that … well, such daunting things are attributed to human nature that one would prefer to be one of the higher animals and have decent instincts.