no sense of humor. Robert maintained a complete and obstinate silence.
The scene with Laurie which occurred one Saturday morning ended with her saying she would leave, and Robert announcing that he would burn all his neckties. Directly after breakfast Alice saw him making his way to the garden. He was necktieless, and in his hand were some bright colored objects—neckties, all of them. He disappeared in the shrubbery. Then Alice saw a little spiral of smoke arising. As in all well-regulated households, matches were forbidden to children in the Marcey family. By the time Alice got there there was no Robert, nothing but a little heap of scorching and smoldering neckties. She stared at them, and then she sat down beside them and thought:
Children are generally so good that an open act of rebellion or a maliciously destructive act leaves us gasping. We don't know how to meet it; we are so used to only minor protests from them that anything else takes our breath away. This was not naughtiness; Alice realized some moral issue was at stake in Robert's mind. She realized that here she was face to face with a supreme protest. She realized, moreover, that he had trumped all their tricks; in other words, he had forced them into making a row that no necktie was worth—or else into letting him alone.
Swiftly Alice made up her mind. She buried the neckties. When she went up-stairs to her own room Robert had returned by some circuitous route. Through an open crack in the door she saw him standing before the looking glass in the spare room. In his hands he had a straight piece of rag. Over and over he was trying to tie a necktie with it. Then suddenly, with a flash of insight, that is so common in fiction and so rare in life, she understood what was the matter.
