No wonder at Titia's sullenness or Atty's storms of rage.

The children only learned what they were taught.
"Phillis, what is the matter?
What has the boy done amiss ?" Phillis turned round with the defiant look which she assumed every time Mrs.Grey entered the nursery, only a little harder, a little fiercer, with the black brows bent, and the under-hung mouth almost savage in its expression.
"What has he done, ma'am?
he has disobeyed me.

I'll teach you to do it again, you little villain you!" "Phillis!" Never before had Phillis's new mistress addressed her in that tone; it made her pause a second, and then her blows fell with redoubled strength on the shrinking shoulders, even the head, of the frantic, furious boy.
Now there was one thing which in all her life Christian never could stand, and that was, to see a child beaten, or in any way ill used.

The tyranny which calls itself authority, the personal revenge which hides under the name of punishment, and both used, cowardly, by the stronger against the weaker, were, to her keen sense of justice, so obnoxious, so detestable that they always roused in her a something, which is at the root of all the righteous rebellions in the world--a something which God, who ordained righteous authority, implants in every honest human heart as a safeguard against authority unrighteous and therefore authority no longer.

If Christian had been a mother, and seen the father of her own children beating one of them in the way Phillis beat Arthur, it would have made her, as she was wont to say, with a curious flash of her usually quiet eyes, "dangerous." She wasted no words.