It always annoyed her to see her brother sitting at the foot of the dinner table. They had fought about it for five years--whether she as eldest child or he as the only man in the house ought to occupy this place of honor. "I'm not afraid of him," said Durland. "Oh, are you a naughty little boy?" said Dolly, laughing in an irritating way. Mrs. Conway, to avert war, began talking about the day's schedule--the problem of how to work in a few lessons without interfering with any of the more important pleasures of her children. "Antonia first, I think. Wouldn't that be your idea, Dolly--Antonia at half past nine? Dolly and Durland sometimes sleep rather late--so good for them, I think--but Antonia is up early. She reads sometimes from five o'clock. She reads a great deal--everything." "Quite the little genius, according to mother," said Dolly. "She is clever," answered Mrs. Conway passionately. "I don't know why you two are always so disagreeable about your little sister." "Because you spoil her so, mother," said Dolly. "Because she's so dirty, mother," said Durland. Mrs. Conway made this attack a means of aligning herself with her children against the governess. "Oh, well," she said, "that is all going to be changed now. Miss Exeter is going to make us all over. Antonia is to be clean and tidy, though why in the world your uncle thinks it desirable for a child of eleven to think of nothing but clothes I can't see. And Durland is to be made into a mathematician. I suppose I'm very ignorant, but I never could see what good algebra does a person--all about greyhounds leaping after hares, and men doing pieces of work at seventy-five cents a day. I wish I could find some like that. Poor Durland, like so many people with a creative turn of mind, simply cannot do mathematics." "More people than creative geniuses are poor at mathematics," said Pearl genially; and Durland, afraid that she would identify him with his mother in this ridiculous point of view, looked into those pools of gray light and said modestly that he was just a dub at problems. "Then at half past eleven," Mrs. Conway went on, "you'll be free to take Antonia to the beach--the public beach, where she likes to get a swim and see her little friends." "Fight a round or two with her little enemies," said her brother. "She's only fought once this summer," said his mother. "And I for one think she was perfectly right. Maud is the most annoying child--ugly and impertinent like her mother, and very badly brought up." "Well, that's not a patch on what they think about Antonia," said Durland, and he turned to Miss Exeter. "Gee, it was great! This Maud child said something rude about Antonia's bare feet, and she sailed in and landed her one on the jaw; and they fought so that the nurses and governesses all ran screaming away and the life-saving men had to come in and separate them." Mrs. Conway hated this story about her youngest child.