It had been her habit thus to diagnose Stephen to his mother. And as for the remark about the relief it would be to have Stephen go to school, it was threadbare with repetition. She scarcely knew she had said it, so familiar was it. It astonished her to have Mr. Knapp look at her as though she had said something which shocked him. She was nettled at his look and replied to it resentfully by a statement of her oft-repeated philosophy of life, “The only way to manage children, Mr. Knapp, is never to let them get ahead of you. If you watch for the first signs of naughtiness and cut it short”—her gesture indicated how it was to be cut short—“it doesn’t go any further.”
To illustrate her point she now addressed Stephen’s listening, stubborn back in a reproving tone of virtue, “Stephen, you mustn’t kick your blocks like that. It’s naughty to.”
Stephen instantly kicked them harder than ever and continued to present a provocatively rebellious back to the visitor.
Mrs. Anderson turned to his father with the gratified look traditionally ascribed to the Teutonic warlords when they forced Serbia into a corner. She tapped the fingers of one hand rapidly in the palm of the other and waited for the father of the criminal to take action. He continued to draw his needle in and out of the stocking he was darning. His face looked like Stephen’s back.
What a disagreeable man Mr. Knapp was! She was not surprised that he had been so disliked by all the sensible people at the store. And how ridiculous for a man to be darning a stocking! He might at least look ashamed of it! Mrs. Anderson disliked him so much at this moment that she felt herself trembling and burning, “Well, Mr. Knapp, you’re not going to pass over a wilful disobedience like that, I hope,” she said, her voice shaking with anger as much at Stephen’s father as at Stephen.
“I didn’t tell Stephen not to kick his blocks,” he said dryly.
Her sense of extravagant rightness in the face of insane wrongness flamed over her so hotly that she could scarcely speak. “Well … but … but … oh, I understand! I understand!” she finally brought out bitterly. “I understand. You think it is all right and perfectly proper for Stephen to kick things around as much as he pleases.”
Mr. Knapp stooped to look into the oven where a rice pudding was cooking. How ridiculous for a man to be cooking a rice pudding! “I’m sure I don’t know why you think you understand anything about it because I have not told you what my opinion on the subject is,” he said, over his shoulder.
Stephen’s back became more acutely listening. He did not understand the big words and he could not make out his father’s tone, except that, unlike Mother, he did not get mad at Stephen and begin to pick on him whenever Mrs. Anderson had been there a little while.
Mrs. Anderson did not make out Mr. Knapp’s tone very well herself, except that it was all part of his intense disagreeableness. A weak poor creature Lester Knapp was, a perfect failure at everything, and without even the poor virtue of knowing it. Besotted in self-conceit into the bargain, though she had never suspected that before. Poor Mrs. Knapp! And those poor children! Her mother’s heart ached for them, left in such hands.
Mr. Knapp went on drawing his thread to and fro silently. Little by little, out of the air, Mrs. Anderson drew the information that she had been insulted, though she had not perceived exactly when. She felt rasped to the bone. With dignity, she drew her cape up around her shoulders and prepared to go.
“Take the advice of an old woman who was bringing up children before you were born,” she said solemnly, her voice shaking with the depth of her feeling. “You’ll find out when it is too late that they must be made to mind! Everything depends on that. Mrs. Knapp, their poor mother, understood that perfectly.”
“Good afternoon,” said Mr. Knapp, very distinctly.
The door closed behind her ungently enough, and with its slam Lester Knapp felt himself transported by an invigorating wave of anger such as he had rarely felt in his life, simple, hot, vivifying rage as good as a drink of whiskey. It made him feel twice as alive as usual. “Strange thing, the human mind,” he thought rapidly. “When I ran into Mrs. Andersonism in business, it only made me sick, sort of hamstrung me with disgust. Anything they’d put their filthy hands on I’d rather let them have than touch them enough to fight them. But when it threatens Stephen. … God! I love to fight it! I’d enjoy strangling that old harpy with my two hands. She thinks she can bully me by threatening my vanity, does she? She thinks she can get her damned old hands on my little boy, does she? I should say it was enough to have killed four of her own.”
He looked over at Stephen’s brooding back and set his stirred and sharpened wits to the problem of switching Stephen off from the track that was taking him towards one of his explosions. He had discovered that Stephen’s salvation at such times was something hard to do, something Stephen could struggle with, but not quarrel with. He thought fast, almost excitedly. Would he think of something first, or would Stephen blow up first?
Stephen turned away from the pile of his toys and began to wander about the kitchen, casting a somber eye on the too familiar things. “Alexander, Alexander, what new world can I get for you?” asked his father, unleashing his
