WHAT are you going to do with a boy who won't wear a necktie? Not with a boy that just makes a fuss and then weakly gives in but a boy who just simply won't wear a necktie? You can ignore what is happening, or you can make a case of that sort of parent lèse majesté known as disobedience; but still it's inglorious to make all that fuss about a necktie.
You have another alternative and a weak one—you can say it's a phase and that it will wear off. Then your child meets your friends, meets his relatives, meets his grandmother. One and all they clamor when they see you next:
"What a manly looking little fellow Robert's getting to be. But so absent-minded! I saw him to-day on the street without a necktie!" That's what happened with Robert. When they asked him what was the matter he simply explained:
"I don't like neckties." When they tied them on for him, sooner or later they found it thrown on the ground, over the back of a chair, anywhere, except around Robert's neck.
It grew to be a nuisance; it grew to be a mystery. It challenged them at every meal. It made question marks at them every time they encountered Robert. It asked them all the time if they were really conscientious parents would they let such a state of things go on? It asked them when they had almost made up their minds not to let such a state of things go on if they had
