Presently Phil arrived. He looked tired with the heat, but his thin face brightened when he saw Stacey there playing with the boys.
“Stacey, you’re a fraud!” he said. “What sort of behavior is this for a misanthrope? You ought to be gloating over what Jack and Carter will grow up to be.”
Catherine put an end to the game and sent the boys out to play on the porch. “Yes,” she said, as she closed the door upon them, “I guess Stacey doesn’t mean all he says. I guess he’s really kind-hearted. I guess he likes children, maybe.”
Phil stared at his wife and smiled. “For heaven’s sake, Catherine,” he demanded, “what’s come over your English?”
Stacey laughed. “Corrupting effect of Carter,” he explained. “Yes, of course I like children.”
“Would you like to have some of your own?” Phil asked.
Stacey reflected, frowning. “Yes,” he replied at last, “I think so. Just one, a boy, so that I could try bringing him up.”
“Upon my word,” said the former, “this is delightful! Fancy finding you not merely humanly usual but positively universal—a bachelor with theories on education! What is your present theory, my son?”
Stacey smiled. However, it had become difficult for him to smile, and when he did so his face took on uneasy lines. He was not at his best when smiling. He was at his best when his face remained impassive and soldierly.
“Oh,” he said drily, “it’s a romantic enough theory, quite Rousseau-like. I’ve just invented it this minute. If I had a son I should take him to live in the country, in some place where the landscape was neither too grand, and thus apt to arouse vast disturbing aspirations in him, nor yet ignominious and depressing, like these dingy middle-western plains. I would have him live among trees, that are handsome and do no harm, and associate familiarly with a great many kindly simple-minded animals such as dogs, cows and horses, with a few cultivated elegant animals such as cats, and—less frequently and intimately—with one or two goats, who are old, sophisticated and skeptical, the _libres penseurs_ among animals.”
“Well,” said Stacey dubiously, “perhaps now and then an occasional, very choice human, such as you or Catherine, just to show him what human beings _can_ become,—but rarely, Phil, rarely!”