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This conversation about Peter’s future, once it had been started, rambled on for the next three weeks, and then Oswald very abruptly saw fit to be called away to Africa again....

Various interlocutors dropped in while that talk was in progress. Arthur felt his way to his real opinions through a series of experimental dogmas.

Arthur’s disposition was towards an extreme Rousseauism. It is the tendency of the interrogative class in all settled communities. He thought that a boy or girl ought to run wild until twelve and not be bothered by lessons, ought to eat little else but fruit and nuts, go bareheaded and barefooted. Why not? Oswald’s disposition would have been to oppose Arthur anyhow, but against these views all his circle of ideas fought by necessity. If Arthur was Ruskinite and Morrisite, Oswald was as completely Huxleyite. If Arthur thought the world perishing for need of Art and Nature, Oswald stood as strongly for the saving power of Science. In this matter of bare feet——

“There’s thorns, pins, snakes, tetanus,” reflected Oswald.

“The foot hardens.”

“Only the sole,” said Oswald. “And not enough.”

“Shielded from all the corruptions of town and society,” said Arthur presently.

“There’s no such corruptor as that old Mother Nature of yours. You daren’t leave that bottle of milk to her for half an hour but what she turns it sour or poisons it with one of her beastly germs.”

“I never approved of the bottle,” said Arthur, bringing a flash of hot resentment into Dolly’s eyes....

Oswald regretted his illustration.

“Old Mother Nature is a half-wit,” he said. “She’s distraught. You overrate the jade. She’s thinking of everything at once. All her affairs got into a hopeless mess from the very start. Most of her world is desert with water running to waste. A tropical forest is three-quarters death and decay, and what is alive is either murdering or being murdered. It’s only when you come to artificial things, such as a ploughed field, for example, that you get space and health and every blade doing its best.”

“I don’t call a ploughed field an artificial thing,” said Arthur.

“But it is,” said Oswald.

Dr. Fremisson was dragged into this dispute. “A ploughed field,” he maintained, “is part of the natural life of man.”

“Like boots and reading.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Dr. Fremisson warily. He had the usual general practitioner’s belief that any education whatever is a terrible strain on the young, and he was quite on the side of Rousseau and Arthur in that matter. Moreover, as a result of his professional endeavours he had been forced to a belief that Nature’s remedies are the best.

“I’d like to know just what does belong to the natural life of man and what is artificial,” said Oswald. “If a ploughed field belongs then a plough belongs. And if a plough belongs a foundry belongs—and a coal mine. And you wouldn’t plough in bare feet—not in those Weald Clays down there? You want good stout boots for those. And you’d let your ploughman read at least a calendar? Boots and books come in, you see.”

“You’re a perfect lawyer, Mr. Sydenham,” said the doctor, and pretended the discussion had become fanciful....

“But you’ll not leave him to go unlettered until he is half grown up!” said Oswald to Dolly in real distress. “It’s so easy to teach ’em to read early and so hard later. I remember my little brother....”

“I am the mother and I muth,” said Dolly. “When Peter displays the slightest interest in the alphabet, the alphabet it shall be.”

Oswald felt reassured. He had a curious confidence that Dolly could be trusted to protect his godchild.