THEY sat in the hammock, their arms around each other, explaining their altercation. They looked so sweet that in Alice's mind their uncouth language became charming. She considered the incident closed, but their grandmother didn't. Tom Marcey didn't think it was closed. His mother said—before every one:
"Something has got to be done about the language which those children use; where they hear such terms I can't imagine!" Then, with her eye on Jamie, who was still pursuing the slaughter of the rose bugs with the concentration of a two-and-a-half-year-old, once it finds a congenial employment, "I wonder why babies are so lovely in their bewitching little plays and become so vulgar as soon as they are older."
After the company had gone, Tom Marcey said, "Something has got to be done about Robert. A boy shouldn't kick his sister."
"They were only fooling," Alice protested weakly.
To this poor argument Tom paid no attention. "It should be instinctive in a manly boy," he said, "not to hurt his little sister. And as for kicks—" Tom's chivalrous spirit shrank before the idea of a brother so lost to decency that he could lift a kicking foot at his sister, even in play.
Alice made no answer to this statement either. History does not teach us that natural man finds any shrinking from lifting his hand to the females of his race. This theory of man's reluctance to hurt those of the
