“The children are such delicate little things, too, a constant care.” Mrs. Merritt snatched the opportunity to display her inside information. “There’s hardly a week that Doctor isn’t called in there for one or another of them. He often tells me that _he_ doesn’t know what to do for them. They don’t seem to have anything to do _with_! No digestions, no constitutions. Just like their father. All but little Stephen. He’s _strong_ enough!” “He’s a perfect imp of darkness!” cried old Mrs. Anderson, lifting her thin gray face from her sewing. “I’ve raised a lot of children in my day and seen a lot more, but I never saw such a naughty contrary child as he is in all my born days. Nor so hateful! He never does anything unless it’s to plague somebody by it. The other day, in the last thaw it was, I’d just got my back porch mopped up after the grocer’s boy--you know how he tracks mud in--and I heard somebody fussing around out there, and I opened the door quick, and there was Stephen Knapp lugging over a great pail of mud to dump it on my porch. He’d dumped one already and got it all spread out on the boards. I said, ‘Why, Stephen Knapp, what makes you do such a bad thing?’ I was really paralyzed to see him at it. ‘What _makes_ you be so bad, Stephen?’ I said. And he said--he’s got the hardest, coolest way of saying those wicked things--he said, as cool as you please, ‘’Tause I hate you, Mis’ Anderson, ’tause I hate you.’ And gave me that black look of his....” Through the tepid, stagnant air of the room flickered a sulphurous zig-zag of passion. The women shrank back from it, horrified and fascinated. “Mr. Prouty says,” quoted his wife, “that Stephen Knapp makes him think of the old Bible stories about people possessed of the devil. His mother is at her wit’s end. Mr. Prouty says she has asked him to help her with prayer. And Stephen gets worse all the time. And yet she’s always perfectly firm with him, never spoils him. And it’s wonderful, her iron self-control when he is in one of his tempers. I never could keep _my_ temper like that. It can’t be due to anything about the way she manages him, for she never had a particle of trouble with the other two. Well, it’ll be a great relief to her, as she often says, when he goes to school with the others.” Mrs. Merritt now said, lowering her voice, “You know she has a chronic skin trouble too that she never says anything about.” “Like St. Paul, Mr. Prouty says.” “Doctor has tried everything to cure it. Diet. Electricity. X-rays. All the salves in the drugstores. Oh, no,” she explained hastily in answer to an unspoken thought somewhere in the room. “Oh, _no_, it’s nothing _horrid_! Her husband is a _nice_ enough man, as far as that goes. Doctor thinks it may be nervous, may be due to....” “Nervous!” cried Mrs. Mattie Farnham. “Why, it’s a real eruption, discharging pus and everything. I had to help her dress a place on her back once when Stephen was a tiny baby. Nervous!”