One of my favorite cuts in the movies
A dissolve, actually: when Mr. John is speaking about how actually it's fortunate that "a child died as a child" and then in the middle of his pontificating, we dissolve to Harriet sitting at the table, in grief and misery. To me it underscores the phoniness of what the old man was saying. All his pseudo-wisdom means nothing to the heartbroken young girl who's just lost her brother. Later, it's Captain John who's able to comfort her.
I wonder if this is the effect Renoir was going for or if anyone else took it the same way. The rest of the film is so classically restrained that this dissolve had quite an unsettling effect, at least to me, almost as if it was an avant-garde moment. I liked it.