After this final bit of reminiscence--probably designed to be repeated to Mr. Schofield--she disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, and returned with a pitcher of lemonade and a blue china dish sweetly freighted with flat ginger cookies of a composition that was her own secret. Then, having set this collation before her guests, she presented Penrod with a superb, intricate, and very modern machine of destructive capacities almost limitless. She called it a pocket-knife.
"I suppose you'll do something horrible with it," she said, composedly. "I hear you do that with everything, anyhow, so you might as well do it with this, and have more fun out of it. They tell me you're the Worst Boy in Town."
"Oh, Aunt Sarah!" Mrs. Schofield lifted a protesting hand.
"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Crim.
"But on his birthday!"
"That's the time to say it. Penrod, aren't you the Worst Boy in Town?"
Penrod, gazing fondly upon his knife and eating cookies rapidly, answered as a matter of course, and absently, "Yes'm."
"Certainly!" said Mrs. Crim. "Once you accept a thing about yourself as established and settled, it's all right. Nobody minds. Boys are just people, really."
"No, no!" Mrs. Schofield cried, involuntarily.
"Yes, they are," returned Aunt Sarah. "Only they're not quite so awful, because they haven't learned to cover themselves all over with little pretences. When Penrod grows up he'll be just the same as he is now, except that whenever he does what he wants to do he'll tell himself and other people a little story about it to make his reason for doing it seem nice and pretty and noble."
"No, I won't!" said Penrod suddenly.
"There's one cookie left," observed Aunt Sarah. "Are you going to eat it?"
"Well," said her great-nephew, thoughtfully, "I guess I better."
"Why?" asked the old lady. "Why do you guess you'd `better'?"
"Well," said Penrod, with a full mouth, "it might get all dried up if nobody took it, and get thrown out and wasted."
"You're beginning finely," Mrs. Crim remarked. "A year ago you'd have taken the cookie without the same sense of thrift."
"Ma'am?"
"Nothing. I see that you're twelve years old, that's all.
There are more cookies, Penrod." She went away, returning with a fresh supply and the observation, "Of course, you'll be sick before the day's over; you might as well get a good start."
Mrs. Schofield looked thoughtful. "Aunt Sarah," she ventured, "don't you really think we improve as we get older?"
"Meaning," said the old lady, "that Penrod hasn't much chance to escape the penitentiary if he doesn't? Well, we do learn to restrain ourselves in some things; and there are people who really want someone else to take the last cookie, though they aren't very common. But it's all right, the world seems to be getting on." She gazed whimsically upon her great-nephew and added, "Of course, when you watch a boy and think about him, it doesn't seem to be getting on very fast."
Penrod moved uneasily in his chair; he was conscious that he was her topic but unable to make out whether or not her observations were complimentary; he inclined to think they were not. Mrs. Crim settled the question for him.
"I suppose Penrod is regarded as the neighbourhood curse?"
"Oh, no," cried Mrs. Schofield. "He----"
"I dare say the neighbours are right," continued the old lady placidly. "He's had to repeat the history of the race and go through all the stages from the primordial to barbarism. You don't expect boys to be civilized, do you?"
"Well, I----"
"You might as well expect eggs to crow. No; you've got to take boys as they are, and learn to know them as they are."
"Naturally, Aunt Sarah," said Mrs. Schofield, "I KNOW Penrod."
Aunt Sarah laughed heartily. "Do you think his father knows him, too?"
"Of course, men are different," Mrs. Schofield returned, apologetically. "But a mother knows----"
"Penrod," said Aunt Sarah, solemnly, "does your father understand you?"
"Ma'am?"
"About as much as he'd understand Sitting Bull!" she laughed.
"And I'll tell you what your mother thinks you are, Penrod. Her real belief is that you're a novice in a convent."
"Ma'am?"
"Aunt Sarah!"
"I know she thinks that, because whenever you don't behave like a novice she's disappointed in you. And your father really believes that you're a decorous, well-trained young business man, and whenever you don't live up to that standard you get on his nerves and he thinks you need a walloping. I'm sure a day very seldom passes without their both saying they don't know what on earth to do with you. Does whipping do you any good, Penrod?"
"Ma'am?"
"Go on and finish the lemonade; there's about glassful left.
Oh, take it, take it; and don't say why! Of COURSE you're a little pig."
Penrod laughed gratefully, his eyes fixed upon her over the rim of his uptilted glass.
"Fill yourself up uncomfortably," said the old lady. "You're twelve years old, and you ought to be happy--if you aren't anything else. It's taken over nineteen hundred years of Christianity and some hundreds of thousands of years of other things to produce you, and there you sit!"
"Ma'am?"
"It'll be your turn to struggle and muss things up, for the betterment of posterity, soon enough," said Aunt Sarah Crim.
"Drink your lemonade!"
