Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 36
It was while Robert was in this unfortunate mood that Alice undertook to explain to him the virtues of tomboys. Did he want a weak, effeminate sister who later on would be no companion to him, she inquired?
"I don't want to punch the nose of every fellow who calls her a tomboy," he responded to this. "She's awfully unobliging, too. She won't be It when you ask her to."
"Why should I be It all the time, Robert Marcey?" cried Sara with temper. "They want me to be It every single time, just because I'm a girl." Here her lips quivered and beautiful tears trembled in her eyes. "Half the time they want me to be It and shut my eyes and count, and after a hundred or a hundred and fifty they run away and leave me. Is that fair? Would you call that a kind brother, Mother?"
The wrongs of womanhood overwhelmed Sara, and she wept.
"There, you see!" said Robert. "Do you suppose I want a cry-baby around?"
"She wouldn't be a cry-baby if you treated her decently," Alice said.
"No, I wouldn't," said Sara. "They don't treat me decently—they're mean."
"Well," responded Robert, "what makes you want to tag along if we're mean?"
There it was. Why, indeed? There were girls, Robert pointed out, with whom Sara could play.
"Lots of mothers," he added pointedy, "don't want their little girls to play with us boys. We're too rough for girls."
He gave this out in a condescending tone which irritated his mother.
"I see no reason why you need be so rough," she said. "You must remember, Robert, that this yard is Sara's as much as yours."
"Why can't she play with her dolls like other girls?"
"She probably doesn't want to play with dolls all the time," Alice suggested, from the memories of her own youth.
"No, I don't," said Sara. "I want to play, and I don't want them to be mean to me."
"If you acted all right nobody'd be mean to you. If you didn't tell tales—if you weren't a cry-baby," her brother suggested.
Alice cut him short. "There are others who tell tales besides Sara," she said.
In this fashion, peace—it must be confessed of an armed sort—seemed to have been concluded and a sort of understanding seemed to have been arrived at. Alice clinched it with: "When you boys are playing in the yard there's no reason why Sara shouldn't play with you."
Yet Alice felt vaguely a brute as she said these words, and as her uneasy gaze traveled over the yard it seemed only too frequently Sara's long legs were scissoring the lawn in pursuit of retreating males.
"It's not," she told her husband, "as if half the boys who came here weren't smaller than Sara. It's all Robert's fault. He has the masculine attitude, the fatal conservatism of childhood, and he's got to get over it if he's going to live in the modern world."
This seemed to settle things. But in the world of children things won't stay settled. The unexpected crops out.