“Isn’t it awful?” Harlan groaned. “Isn’t it dismaying to think what children are coming to nowadays? I’d hoped you’d let me sit on the veranda a little while with you, Martha; but I can’t ask you to stay out in an air made hideous by all this squawking and squealing.” “Then you might come in with me,” she laughed. “Our walls are pretty thick.” The walls of the big old house were as she said, but open windows brought the shrill, incessant “Watch me!” indoors, and the annoyed Harlan complained further of his nephew. “It makes one respect the Chinese,” he said. “They at least pay some attention to ancestors. Only certain tribes biologically very low worship children, I understand; but that seems to be our most prevalent American habit to-day. We’re deliberately making this the age of the abject worship of children—and I wish my grandmother could have lived to give her opinion of it!” “What do you think she’d say, Harlan?” “Isn’t hard to guess! She’d have said we’re heading the children straight for perdition. In fact, she thought that about our own generation; she thought father and mother were heading Dan and me that way; yet we were under heavy discipline compared to the way this terrible little Henry’s being brought up. Lena’s family were severe with her, I understand, and she doesn’t believe in discipline. As for Dan, he’s always been just the child’s slave.” Martha looked compassionate. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I suppose he had to have something he could worship.” “Well, he’s got Ornaby Addition,” Harlan suggested dryly. “No. He had to have something besides. I think he’d have worshipped his wife, if she had ever let him, but I suppose she——” “No,” Harlan said, breaking the indefinite pause into which Martha had absently strayed. “But she’s always capable of being jealous.” And he looked at Martha from the side of his eye. “Jealous of me?” “You’ve certainly been made well enough aware of it from the very day he brought her home, Martha.” “Oh, yes,” she assented cheerfully. “She’s never doubted that I’ve always cared for Dan, but she knows that he wasn’t in love with me. She must have always been sure of that, because—well, here I was—he had only to step over next door and ask me, but he asked her, instead. And yet, as you say, she disliked me from the start. She certainly saw I wasn’t the sort to take him away from her, even if I’d thought I could—and I knew I couldn’t. Yet it’s true she was jealous. Do you know what I think really made her so, Harlan? I think almost the principal reason was because I’m so tall.” “What?” “Yes, I do believe it,” Martha insisted. “Someone told me she used to be called ‘French doll’ in New York, and was very sensitive about it. She wanted to be thought a temperamental and romantic opera heroine, and would never stand near a tall woman because she was afraid of being made to look more like a French doll. I think she couldn’t endure the thought of her husband’s having a woman friend as big as I am.”