Therefore the Parson's first care with Ishmael was to sweep him as bare of all thought as might be. He even stopped him when the child, still conscience-ridden, would have poured out exaggerations of misdoings, though he registered the knowledge he guessed at for future guidance. It was against Ishmael's nature to be expansive, and if he had been so on that occasion he would probably never have felt so easy with the Parson again. As it was, he began, in his secretive way, to copy Boase at all points that seemed good to him, doing things of his own initiative which he would have rebelled from being told. When the Parson got him a pony at fair-time, Ishmael soon gathered that a gentleman rode without kicking his horse in the belly or jagging at its mouth, as was the custom in that part of the world. He learnt, too, by the simple reappearance of a tin bath, flanked by an earthen pitcher of water, in his room morning after morning, that a gentleman washed all over every day. At first this bored him considerably, but after one day when the Parson took him down to the cove to bathe, and he had occasion to be ashamed of his grubby little legs and feet beside the other's shining whiteness, that too altered. Yet the Parson had said nothing, hardly given more than a look. In the same way, when he gathered that the Parson trusted him to tell the truth, and that no grievous consequences attended it, he gradually ceased to lie, though this took time, since lying with him, as with many children, had become an instinct. Gradually the whole atmosphere of the Vicarage, with its shiny mahogany furniture, its faded rep curtains, its old prints and few unassuming miniatures of the quiet country gentlefolk who were Boase's ancestors, its queer mingled smell of old books and lavender, all became part of Ishmael's consciousness. He had a great deal of freedom, once the morning's lessons were over, for the Parson was a busy man and his parish many miles wide. At first Boase had been rather worried about these spaces in Ishmael's time, for there were no gentlefolk's children for him to play with nearer than seven or eight miles, and it was a necessary part of the great plan to keep from undue familiarity with the village boys. There was always Phoebe, but Ishmael was growing of an age to despise girls. Besides, nice soft little thing that Phoebe was, she talked with a dialect as thick as treacle. Eventually, however, it turned out that girls were to be Ishmael's chief companions, and the Parson concluded it would do him no harm to be under what is commonly supposed to be a softening influence before plunging into the stern masculinities of St. Renny. It was John-James who brought about the feminine factor in Ishmael's days, some six months after the Vicarage period had begun.