And as the Voice came up again, grave with its own self-importance, menacing with all the weight of his superior physical strength behind it,
"He's wallowing in it," thought Alice in anger, "just wallowing in the bullying of women and little children." At this moment she felt herself one with her offspring. "Nothing but an accident in time has kept him from bullying me." Her fists clenched themselves involuntarily at this thought. "Let us both have been born a few years ago and he would have bullied me, and I What could I have done? I'd have done anything to prevent my ears being split by noises like that."
She listened to him in amazement—she listened to him with wrath, with indignation, with ever-growing rebellion. That was what all his fine phrases about modern means of education and the responsibility of parenthood amounted to! Just give him a chance, and that's what he was really like, and that's what he would be like to his wife. At that moment Tom Marcey was not far removed from a wife-beater in Alice's eyes. She reflected that if her parents had ever spoken to her like that, just once—just once—she could never have had the same feeling toward them again. Even now the thought of the superior tone her father used when she was supposed to have been naughty, enraged her.
"Poor things!" she thought. "We're making them do all of a sudden, from one moment to another, what the poor suffocated little children of past ages were taught to do from their cradles—adapt themselves entirely to grown-up ways. And this ghastly, awful day there's Tom enjoying himself, having a perfectly beautiful time suppressing and bullying his own flesh and blood."
Two paragraphs ornamented Alice's paper. The ink
