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.
