The Heavenly Twins | Page 7

said. "When it
is possible to know it is your business to find out, and if you cannot find

out you must say you don't know. It is moral cowardice, injurious to
yourself, not to own your ignorance; and you may also be misleading,
or unintentionally deceiving, someone else."
"How might the moral cowardice of not owning my ignorance be
injurious to myself, father?" she asked.
"Why, don't you see," he answered, "you would suffer in two ways? If
the habit of inaccuracy became confirmed, your own character would
deteriorate; and by leading people to suppose that you are as wise as
themselves, you lose opportunities of obtaining useful information.
They won't tell you things they think you know already."
Evadne bent her brows upon this lesson and reflected; and doubtless it
was the origin of the verbal accuracy for which she afterward became
notable. Patient investigation had always been a pleasure, but from that
time forward it became a principle also. She understood from what her
father had said that to know the facts of life exactly is a positive duty;
which, in a limited sense, was what he had intended to teach her; but
the extent to which she carried the precept would have surprised him.
Her mind was prone to experiment with every item of information it
gathered, in order to test its practical value; if she could turn it to
account she treasured it; if not, she rejected it, from whatever source it
came. But she was not herself aware of any reservation in her manner
of accepting instruction. The trick was innate, and in no way interfered
with her faith in her friends, which was profound. She might have
justified it, however, upon her father's authority, for she once heard him
say to one of her brothers: "Find out for yourself, and form your own
opinions," a lesson which she had laid to heart also. Not that her father
would have approved of her putting it into practice. He was one of
those men who believe emphatically that a woman should hold no
opinion which is not of masculine origin, and the maxims he had for his
boys differed materially in many respects from those which he gave to
his girls. But these precepts of his were, after all, only matches to
Evadne which fired whole trains of reflection, and lighted her to
conclusions quite other than those at which he had arrived himself. In
this way, however, he became her principal instructor. She had attached

herself to him from the time that she could toddle, and had acquired
from his conversation a proper appreciation of masculine precision of
thought. If his own statements were not always accurate it was from no
want of respect for the value of facts; for he was great on the subject,
and often insisted that a lesson or principle of action is contained in the
commonest fact; but he snubbed Evadne promptly all the same on one
occasion when she mentioned a fact of life, and drew a principle of
action therefrom for herself. "Only confusion comes of women thinking
for themselves on social subjects," he said, "You must let me decide all
such matters for you, or you must refer them to your husband when you
come under his control."
Evadne did not pay much attention to this, however, because she
remembered another remark of his with which she could not make it
agree. The remark was that women never had thought for themselves,
and that therefore it was evident that they could not think, and that they
should not try. Now, as it is obvious that confusion cannot come of a
thing that has never been done, the inaccuracy in one or other of these
statements was glaring enough to put both out of the argument. But
what Evadne did note was the use of the word control.
As she grew up she became her father's constant companion in his
walks, and, flattered by her close attention, he fell into the way of
talking a good deal to her. He enjoyed the fine flavour of his own
phrase-making, and so did she, but in such a silent way that nothing
ever led him to suspect it was having any but the most desirable effect
upon her mind. She never attempted to argue, and only spoke in order
to ask a question on some point which was not clear to her, or to make
some small comment when he seemed to expect her to do so. He often
contradicted himself, and the fact never escaped her attention, but she
loved him with a beautiful confidence, and her respect remained
unshaken.
When she had to set herself right between his discrepancies she did not
dwell on the latter as faults in