With some parents, although they are neither harsh nor hard in manner, nor
yet unloving in nature, the habitual first impulse seems to be to refuse:
they appear to have a singular obtuseness to the fact that it is, or can
be, of any consequence to a child whether it does or does not do the thing
it desires. Often the refusal is withdrawn on the first symptom of grief
or disappointment on the child's part; a thing which is fatal to all real
control of a child, and almost as unkind as the first unnecessary
denial,--perhaps even more so, as it involves double and treble pains, in
future instances, where there cannot and must not be any giving way to
entreaties. It is doubtless this lack of perception,--akin, one would
think, to color-blindness,--which is at the bottom of this great and
common inhumanity among kind and intelligent fathers and mothers: an
inhumanity so common that it may almost be said to be universal; so common
that, while we are obliged to look on and see our dearest friends guilty
of it, we find it next to impossible to make them understand what we mean
when we make outcry over some of its glaring instances.

You, my dearest of friends,--or, rather, you who would be, but for this
one point of hopeless contention between us,--do you remember a certain
warm morning, last August, of which I told you then you had not heard the
last? Here it is again: perhaps in print I can make it look blacker to you
than I could then; part of it I saw, part of it you unwillingly confessed
to me, and part of it little Blue Eyes told me herself.

It was one of those ineffable mornings, when a thrill of delight and
expectancy fills the air; one felt that every appointment of the day must
be unlike those of other days,--must be festive, must help on the "white
day" for which all things looked ready. I remember how like the morning
itself you looked as you stood in the doorway, in a fresh white muslin