I do not like to think so. Rather would I believe, as in the case of the broken window, that the mother’s error is chargeable to her never having been a boy. She has a faulty conception of what it means to be yanked about by those boy-hated ringlets of gold, to be harassed and taunted by the inornate but happier hoi polloi. I recall one afternoon when I took a youngster of three around to the barber’s to have him shorn. I returned with the boy in one hand and the curls in the other. He was magnificently cologned and wanted everybody to “smell it.” The mother was waiting with an empty shoe-box in her lap. She was sitting by the window, in the soft half-light of the early evening, and she caressed the golden bronze ringlets before putting them away. And something glistened in her eye and it fell into the box and was packed away with the curls. I shouldn’t wonder if it were there yet, for somehow I can’t help thinking that a tear like that must crystallise into a tiny pearl and glisten on forever. But when this mother looked up at the boy, she was smiling, almost proudly; and she patted the shiny, round head, and kissed it, cologne and all, and quoted a verse about having “lost a baby and gained a man,” declaring that he really looked much better than she had expected. And the boy was put to bed and slept coolly and comfortably, and he’s had a clean scalp and a clear conscience ever since, I guess. But here I am, taking up the reader’s precious time talking about clothes and curls--neither of which mere man is supposed to know anything about--when all I meant to do was to emphasise the fact that long before a half-dozen of his birthdays have been celebrated, the boy must be taken up as an abstract proposition. At the age of five, then, let us say, the boy reaches the stage of recognisable and indisputable masculinity. This is the logical time for the properly constituted father to take the helm of the son’s destiny. If he does not do so, through lack of interest, lack of time or lack of the faculty for it, the mother must needs go on with the struggle. Her five years of training the baby will not come amiss in training the boy. But she must now reckon with boyhood as a distinct classification of childhood. She must remember that from now on, every year, every month, every day, widens the gap of sex divergence. She will do well to look at the bearded men who pass her door and consider that every attribute of masculinity exists, embryonically, in her round-faced baby boy. From now on, if she hopes to appeal to the best that is in him, she must not only study the boy, but she must study the world from the boy’s viewpoint. The nearer the mother can get to the boy’s inner emotions, the more effectively can she direct the trend of his mental, moral and physical development. Herein lies the secret of getting and keeping a grip on the boy. II THE SIMPLICITY OF DISCIPLINE