And as unlike his brothers as he was physically, so unlike he remained in disposition. By all the children as by Dorastus himself the difference in kind was felt. He remained solitary among them and at odds with all. They set him down a domineering, bad-tempered thing, and he summed them up scornfully as a pack of pudding-heads. It was not plain to any one why he thought himself superior: his actual accomplishments were somewhat less than ordinary. Bullet-headed, downright Hector, his brother nearest in age, could beat him at any sport, and when their differences brought them to blows was rather more than half sure of victory over his senior, inferior to him in size and art; Martin was cleverer than he at his books; the little girls even could give him points in conduct--yet his attitude of every minute insisted upon it that he was better than any of them, and that his mother was more particularly his mother than she was theirs. Emmie, it is true, did not reprove him quite as she did Hector; he was allowed more than the others the full swing of his temperament. His step-father punctiliously refrained from meddling with him, and if he made trouble with his temper and his pride Emmie warned her nice-natured children not to irritate him, to make allowances for him. Insensibly that qualified the relation between Dorastus and his mother. That negative indulgence he felt, however dimly, did not prove him a favorite: it made him a sort of alien. He became more reserved in his demands upon his mother. There were too many yellow heads for one boy to contend with successfully by ordinary means. He still held to it bravely in his attitude towards his brothers and sisters that he was better than they, and that his mother belonged exclusively to him, but herself he troubled less and less with his jealousy and his claims. It might have seemed at last almost as if she were become indifferent to him. Absorbed by her domestic cares, she had scarcely perceived the change.