got mad. You were mad because you were selfish. You wouldn't let Jamie take the blocks. You were a bad girl."
Silliness in his sister irritated him, and his parents frequently laughed at sayings of hers which irritated him most deeply. He did not consider her a baby to be indulged, but a trying and flighty contemporary.
"When you know what you did," said Tom, "what made you talk about wind in trees?" Alice sighed. Her husband frowned.
When a child is five it certainly ought to have more responsibility, and it is hard for the masculine mind to tolerate such vagueness.
"I'll tell you why she didn't," Robert volunteered. What he considered the smirking expression of his sister's face annoyed him. "She was afraid you'd punish her for being bad to the baby. She never tells the bad things she does—never."
Indeed, she never did. Her one desire in life was to please. Far from the mind of Sara was the telling of anything disagreeable about herself. Such happenings dropped promptly into the bottomless pit of oblivion, or were translated into some one else's fault.
Robert spoke with bitter disapproval; telling the bad things he did was his long suit. He had only to tell his parents the truth about his worst sins to be treated with lenience. He had gotten to depend a good deal on this shining quality of his to get him out of scrapes. Like most brothers, he had but small opinion of his sister's intelligence, and even less since she failed to grasp so simple a fact. At his son's words Tom Marcey eyed his daughter gloomily.
"She has no memory and no logic," said he. "She hasn't the slightest conception of cause and effect."
It is talk like this from men concerning their children
