THERE was a time when being a parent was a simple thing, if not always an easy one. Parents in those days knew exactly what was good for their children. It was good for them to obey their parents implicitly. It was good for them to believe their parents infallible. Parents were to be honored—the Bible said so. The parental will was to a child as the will of God to a true believer. If a child failed in obedience, then, too, one's course was clear—one did the awful thing known as breaking the child's will, and one did it with a clear conscience.
Children in those easy days were considered little lumps of clay to be molded by their parents into definite and approved patterns, and their minds were looked on as empty pitchers, to be filled by the wine of wisdom poured in by parents and teachers and others in authority.
While Tom and Alice Marcey were more modern than that in their beliefs, for the first two years and a half that they were parents they lived wrapped in complacency as in a garment. If they had not hidden the fact that they thought they were pretty nearly the only perfect parents living, no one would have stood them a minute.
They thought in their hearts that Robert was so good and well because they were unusually wise people. They were so sure of this that they spent many agreeable evenings thanking God that they were not as other parents.
