Sara looked at yesterday as down a vista of years. She shook her head.
"I don't now," she repeated with maddening sweetness. "I don't get dirty and horrid when I play. Mother, do I?"
"Often!" responded Alice brutally.
"Oh, no, I don't," Sara contradicted in sirupy tones.
"That," said Alice fiercely to her husband, "is what, you get by correcting one child before another."
"That is what I get?" he asked with the blindness of the male, "she seemed to me very charming."
This was more than Alice could bear. Sara had been ostentatiously affected, so affected that Alice longed to slap her, but Tom had drunk in all this sentiment, and apparently stood ready for more. What was the use of men, anyway, when they didn't know true affection from affectation? He could even reply pleasantly when she asked, "Aren't I a little angel, Father?"
There comes an end to all days, and no mother can deny that this had been a trying one. After everything that had happened, to have Sara turn sugary and superior was almost more than flesh could endure. The worst of it was that Sara was really being bad as anything, bad as Eve, and you couldn't say a thing to her; worse still, you couldn't do a thing to her. She was self-conscious, superior, affected, had an insufferable "I am better than thou" manner, toward Robert, was encased in an armor of vanity so thick that it could not be broken even by violence, and perfectly sure all the time that she was a good girl. Alice longed for the power to mete out some retribution to her as no naughtiness of Sara's had ever made her long.
Robert in disgust vanished from the scene and presently from a distance Alice heard a cautious "chugg chugging."
