Now was the time to give Mr. Knapp some good advice that would save him trouble in the end. She never could stand hunchbacks and cripples and had not liked Mr. Knapp very well even before he was so dreadfully paralyzed; but she felt it her duty to help out in that stricken household. “You’ll have trouble with that child to-day, Mr. Knapp,” she said wisely; “he’s spoiling for a spanking. Anybody with experience can see that by looking at him. My! what a relief ’twill be when he’s out of the house and goes to school with the others.” It had been her habit thus to diagnose Stephen to his mother. And as for the remark about the relief it would be to have Stephen go to school, it was threadbare with repetition. She scarcely knew she had said it, so familiar was it. It astonished her to have Mr. Knapp look at her as though she had said something which shocked him. She was nettled at his look and replied to it resentfully by a statement of her oft-repeated philosophy of life, “The only way to manage children, Mr. Knapp, is never to let them get ahead of you. If you watch for the first signs of naughtiness and cut it short”--her gesture indicated how it was to be cut short--“it doesn’t go any further.” To illustrate her point she now addressed Stephen’s listening, stubborn back in a reproving tone of virtue, “Stephen, you mustn’t kick your blocks like that. It’s naughty to.” Stephen instantly kicked them harder than ever and continued to present a provocatively rebellious back to the visitor. Mrs. Anderson turned to his father with the gratified look traditionally ascribed to the Teutonic warlords when they forced Serbia into a corner. She tapped the fingers of one hand rapidly in the palm of the other and waited for the father of the criminal to take action. He continued to draw his needle in and out of the stocking he was darning. His face looked like Stephen’s back. What a disagreeable man Mr. Knapp was! She was not surprised that he had been so disliked by all the sensible people at the store. And how ridiculous for a man to be darning a stocking! He might at least look ashamed of it! Mrs. Anderson disliked him so much at this moment that she felt herself trembling and burning, “Well, Mr. Knapp, you’re not going to pass over a wilful disobedience like that, I hope,” she said, her voice shaking with anger as much at Stephen’s father as at Stephen. “_I_ didn’t tell Stephen not to kick his blocks,” he said dryly. Her sense of extravagant rightness in the face of insane wrongness flamed over her so hotly that she could scarcely speak. “Well ... but ... but ... oh, I understand! I under_stand_!” she finally brought out bitterly. “I understand. You think it is all right and perfectly proper for Stephen to kick things around as much as he pleases.”