Aging & Wisdom Quote by Hector Hugh Munro

Munro, writing as Saki, lands this like a needle slipped under the skin: the problem isn’t ignorance, it’s character. “Hyacinth’s temperament” (a slyly specific reference to a particular child in Saki’s world of drawing rooms and quiet cruelty) signals that we’re not dealing with innocent mischief. We’re dealing with a disposition built for dominance, grievance, and petty theater. The line refuses the comforting Victorian-to-modern story we like to tell about children: that time and education sand down rough edges into decency.

The sting is in the pivot from “better” to “more.” “Better” carries moral weight; it implies conscience, empathy, self-correction. “More” is just accumulation: information, technique, leverage. Saki’s subtext is almost bureaucratically bleak. Growing up doesn’t redeem the child with a predatory streak; it upgrades them. The same impulses get a larger vocabulary, a longer memory, a better understanding of how adults can be managed, how rules can be bent without breaking, how reputations can be bruised with plausible deniability.

Context matters: Saki wrote in an Edwardian culture that prized manners as proof of virtue, even as empire and class hierarchy ran on coercion. His satire keeps pointing out the mismatch between surface civility and underlying appetite. Hyacinth’s “temperament” becomes a miniature of that society: polished, informed, and still ethically untouched. The line’s intent isn’t to pathologize a child; it’s to warn adults who keep mistaking cleverness for growth, and education for goodness.