She voiced the common fallacy of mothers, that their husbands as boys were of coarser fibre than their children. She bowed her head on her arms beneath the lamp and cried. Her little Peter to be thrust out and made lonely, simply because he had too much imagination! It was cruel! CHAPTER XIII--PRICKCAUTIONS There was no withstanding his questions. Peter had to be told why: it was because he was too Peterish. He was going for the good of Kay. All these years in trying so hard to love her, he had been harming her--it amounted to that as he understood it. He was being sent to school that he might learn to be like other children--like Riska and Eustace, for instance. “When I'm quite like them, can I come home?” Ah, that was in the future. Unknowingly he had committed an indiscretion, the penalty for which was exile--the indiscretion was called “'magination.” He felt horribly ashamed, even though Grace did assure him that some of the very greatest people had been guilty of the same mistake. “Why, Master Peter, you're gettin' orf lightly, that you are. There was once a young fellah as dreamed dreams about sheaves bowin' down to 'im, and the moon and stars makin' a basin for 'im. D'yer know wot 'appened?” “I think that's silly,” said Peter. “How could the moon and stars make a basin?” “'Tain't silly neither, 'cause it says it in the Bible. Any-'ow, when 'e told 'is dreams d'yer know wot 'appened? 'Is h'eleven brethren, they chucked 'im in a pit--yes, they did. And there 'e'd 'ave stayed for keeps if it 'adn't been for a passin' circus as saw 'e was queer and put 'im in their show, and took 'im away into Egypt. Oh my, for a boy wiv 'magination, you're gettin' orf light.” “What did he do in the circus? Did he ever come home again?” “'E grew to be a ruler in h'Egypt and saved 'is pa and ma and eleven brethren, when they wuz starvin'.” “P'raps I'll do that for all of you one day.” “Yer silly little monkey! There yer go again wiv yer queer sayin's.” Peter had been to the Agricultural Hall in Islington and had seen people in side-shows without arms and legs: bearded women; elastic-skinned men; horrid persons with one body and two heads or with a little twin, without even one head, growing out of their chests and waggling their pitiful legs. He wasn't like that in his body; but he supposed he must be something like it inside his head. The belief that he was somehow deformed made him too humble, too abashed to protest; anything that was for his little sister's sake must be right. But he wished that someone had warned him earlier; only in this did he feel himself betrayed.--Anyhow, never in his wildest fancies had he supposed that the moon and stars could make basins--and that boy Joseph had turned out all right. Now he was going to his particular Egypt to get cured.