a knife I want."

After he had finished his watermelon, and while Victorine was
pouring his coffee, the two children came in, scrambling to their
places, and drumming on the table with their knife-handles.

The son and heir, Howard, was very much a boy. He played baseball
too well to be a very good boy, and for the sake of his own self-
respect maintained an attitude of perpetual revolt against his
older sister, who, as much as possible, took the place of the
mother, long since dead. Under her supervision, Howard blacked
his own shoes every morning before breakfast, changed his
underclothes twice a week, and was dissuaded from playing with the
dentist's son who lived three doors below and who had St. Vitus'
dance.

His little sister was much more tractable. She had been
christened Alberta, and was called Snooky. She promised to be
pretty when she grew up, but was at this time in that distressing
transitional stage between twelve and fifteen; was long-legged,
and endowed with all the awkwardness of a colt. Her shoes were
still innocent of heels; but on those occasions when she was
allowed to wear her tiny first pair of corsets she was exalted to
an almost celestial pitch of silent ecstasy. The clasp of the
miniature stays around her small body was like the embrace of a
little lover, and awoke in her ideas that were as vague, as
immature and unformed as the straight little figure itself.

When Snooky and Howard had seated themselves, but one chair--at
the end of the breakfast-table, opposite Mr. Bessemer--remained