Sara and Robert, having for the moment only retained Jamie as his child—"your children are the most unreasonable in all the world!"
Robert planted himself before Alice and made this assertion:
"Chicken scraps are not garbage, are they, mother?" and Sara heightened the dramatic effect by bursting into tears and proclaiming loudly:
"He's a mean old thing!" She cast upon her father a haughty look of anger. If Tom Marcey had repudiated Sara as his child for the moment, she had repudiated him as a parent.
"I don't see why they shouldn't have the cart," said Alice.
At this Tom's excitement vanished. He replied with an icy politeness:
"Because I have decided that Jamie's cart is not to be soiled by using it for any such purpose."
Again clamor arose. It had an unreasonable effect on Alice's nerves. Saying, "I hate hens!" she left the room.
But as she went out she heard Sara making a flank attack. Sitting on the floor, with dramatic solemnity she proclaimed:
"Then I won't go at all! They aren't my hens, anyway!" to which in one voice the men of Sara's family—Robert and Tom—replied:
"You've got to go!"
One gathered that physical violence was being used on her and that she was practising the awful counter violence of non-resistance.
Grandma's voice joined the rumpus. That good lady had maintained a dignified and disapproving silence. She now said:
