Walter bowed his head for a moment; and the doctor took advantage of the opportunity to give the children a look of warning. They remembered; and, if afterwards Walter discovered that he had cut a singular figure in this household, they were not to blame.
"You do well to do it," said Holsma. "We don't do it; and perhaps we do well not to."
"Certainly," said the mother. "Everyone must act according to his own conviction."
This simple statement moved Walter more than any of them could have imagined. He--a conviction! That short sentence of Mevrouw Holsma attributed to him a dignity and importance that was strange to him, and gave him a right he had never thought of before. Through the soup he was thinking continually: "I may have a conviction!"
It never occurred to him that a thing could be interpreted otherwise than it was interpreted for him by his mother or Stoffel, or some other grown-up person. The whole question of praying, or not praying, did not appear so important to him as this new fact, that he could have a conviction. His heart swelled.
The doctor, who understood Walter, recalled him from his thoughts.
"Everyone must act according to his conviction; and in order to come to a conviction one has to reflect a long time over the matter. I am convinced that our little guest would like to eat some of those peas. Pass them to him, Sietske."
Walter had grasped the import of Holsma's words, and also the meaning of this transition to the peas. Walter felt--without putting his feelings into words--that the pedantry of the schoolroom had been put aside at five o'clock, and that his host merely wanted to give him a friendly warning against dogmatic bigotry, without tainting the fresh, wholesome atmosphere of the dining-room.
Despite his shy, retiring nature--or, better, in connection with this characteristic--Walter was an extremely intelligent boy. This fact had escaped almost everybody he had come in contact with because of his lack of self-confidence, which prevented him from revealing his true self. He usually seemed to comprehend more slowly than others; but this was because he was less easily satisfied with the result of his thinking. His mind was exacting of knowledge. During Walter's sickness Holsma had remarked this peculiarity of the boy, and his interest had been enlisted at once.