A fertile source of childish untruth, especially in the case of girls, is the wish to please. Here we have to do with very dissimilar things. An emotional child who in a sudden fit of tenderness for mother, aunt or teacher gushes out, ‘Oh I _do_ love you,’ or ‘What sweet lovely eyes you have,’ or other pretty flattery, may be sincere for the moment, the exaggeration being indeed the outcome of a sudden ebullition of emotion. There is more of acting and artfulness in the flatteries which take their rise in a calculating wish to say the nice agreeable thing. Some children are, I believe, adepts at these amenities. Those in whom the impulse is strong and dominant are presumably those who in later years make the good society actors. In all this childish simulation and exaggeration we have to do with the germs of what may become a great moral evil, insincerity, that is falsity in respect of what is best and ought to be sacred. Yet this childish flattery, though undoubtedly a mild mendacity, is a most amiable mendacity through its charming motive—always supposing that it is a pure wish to please, and is not complicated with an _arrière pensée_, the hope of gaining some favour from the object of the devotion. Perhaps there is no variety of childish fault more difficult to deal with; if only for the reason that in checking the impulse we are robbing ourselves of the sweetest offerings of childhood. The other side of this wish to please is the fear to give offence, and this, I suspect, is a fertile source of childish prevarication. If, for example, a child is asked whether he does not like or admire something, his feeling that the questioner expects him to say ‘Yes’ makes it very hard to say ‘No’. Mrs. Burnett gives us a reminiscence of this early experience. When she was less than three, she writes, a lady visitor, a friend of her mother, having found out that the baby newly added to the family was called Edith, remarked to her: ‘That’s a pretty name. My baby is Eleanor. Isn’t that a pretty name?’ On being thus questioned she felt in a dreadful difficulty, for she did not like the sound of ‘Eleanor,’ and yet feared to be rude and say so. She got out of it by saying she did not like the name as well as ‘Edith’. These temptations and struggles, which may impress themselves on memory for the whole of life, illustrate the influence of older persons’ wishes and expectations on the childish mind. It is possible that we have here to do with something akin to “suggestion,” that force which produces such amazing results on the hypnotised subject, and is known to be a potent influence for good or for evil on the young mind. A leading question of the form, ‘Isn’t this pretty?’ ‘Aren’t you fond of me?’ may easily overpower for a moment the child’s own conviction super-imposing that of the stronger mind. Such passive utterance coming from a mind over-ridden by another’s authority is not to be confounded with conscious falsehood.