A stage child does not get up at five o'clock in the morning to
practice playing on a penny whistle. A stage child never wants a
bicycle and drives you mad about it. A stage child does not ask
twenty complicated questions a minute about things that you don't
understand, and then wind up by asking why you don't seem to know
anything, and why wouldn't anybody teach you anything when you were a
little boy.

The stage child does not wear a hole in the seat of its knickerbockers
and have to have a patch let in. The stage child comes downstairs on
its feet.

The stage child never brings home six other children to play at horses
in the front garden, and then wants to know if they can all come in to
tea. The stage child never has the wooping-cough, and the measles,
and every other disease that it can lay its hands on, and be laid up
with them one after the other and turn the house upside down.

The stage child's department in the scheme of life is to harrow up its
mother's feelings by ill-timed and uncalled-for questions about its
father. It always wants to know, before a roomful of people, where
"dear papa" is, and why he has left dear mamma; when, as all the
guests know, the poor man is doing his two years' hard or waiting to
be hanged. It makes everybody so uncomfortable.

It is always harrowing up somebody--the stage child; it really ought
not to be left about as it is. When it has done upsetting its mother
it fishes out some broken-hearted maid, who has just been cruelly
severed forever from her lover, and asks her in a high falsetto voice