“Well,” replied Betty, “it’s her paper dolls and her button-house. She always leaves ’em around. She set up her button-house all over the rug in the parlour--you know, the rug that its patterns make rooms? An’ she had her paper dolls living in it. That was this morning--and we forgot ’em. And after dinner, while we’re outdoors, the minister came. And he walked into the buttons and onto the glass dangler off the lamp that we used for a folding-doors. And he slid a long ways on it. And he scrushed it,” Betty concluded resentfully. “And now she’s in her room.” We pondered it. There was justice there, we saw that. But shut Margaret Amelia in a room! It was as ignominious as caging a captain. “Did she cry?” we indelicately demanded. “Awful,” said Betty. “She wouldn’t of cared if it had only been raining,” she added. We looked hard at the sky. We should have been willing to have it rain to make lighter Margaret Amelia’s durance, and sympathy could go no further. But there was not a cloud. It was Mary Elizabeth who questioned the whole matter. “How,” said she, “does it do any good to shut her up in her room?” We had never thought of this. We stared wonderingly at Mary Elizabeth. Being shut in your room was a part of the state of not being grown up. When you grew up, you shut others in their rooms or let them out, as you ruled the occasion to require. There was Grandmother Beers, for instance, coming out the door with scissors in her hands and going toward her sweet-pea bed. Once she must have shut Mother in her room. Mother! Delia was incurably a defender of things as they are. Whenever I am tempted to feel that guardians of an out-worn order must know better than they seem to know, I remember Delia. Delia was born reactionary, even as she was born brunette. “Why,” said she with finality, “that’s the way they punish you.” Taken as a fact and not as a philosophy, there was no question about this. “I was shut in one for pinching Frankie Ames,” I acknowledged. “I was in one for getting iron-rust on my skirt,” said Calista, “and for being awful cross when my bath was, and for putting sugar on the stove to get the nice smell.” “I was in one for telling a lie,” Betty admitted reluctantly. “And Margaret Amelia was in one for wading in the creek. She was in a downstairs one. And I took a chair round outside to help her out--but she wouldn’t do it.” “Pooh! I was in one lots of times,” Delia capped it. And, as usual, we looked at her with respect as having experiences far transcending our own. “I’ll be in one again if I don’t go home and take care of my canary,” she added. “Mamma said I would.” “Putting sugar on the stove isn’t as wicked as telling a lie, is it?” Mary Elizabeth inquired. We weighed it. On the whole, we were inclined to think that it was not so wicked, “though,” Delia put in, “you do notice the sugar more.” “Why do they shut you in the same way for the different wickeds?” Mary Elizabeth demanded.