Elizabeth gazed at her husband with open admiration. "Of course they are entitled to consideration," she said decidedly. "And I believe what you have said--with reservations. Suppose Baby Dick, for example, should lean out of the window too far--a second-story window, I mean--and I should see him doing it and feel pretty certain he was going to pitch out head first and cripple himself for life. Do you think I ought to stand still and let the law of gravitation teach him not to do it a second time?"
Sam Brewster laid down his pipe and gazed steadfastly at his wife. She was looking extremely young and bewitchingly pretty as she leaned toward him, her cheeks pink, her brown eyes glowing with earnestness in which he thought he detected a spark of her old girlish mischief.
"'And still the wonder grew,'" he quoted solemnly, "'that one small head could carry all she knew!'"
"Well, of course you've got me. You'd have to haul in the young person by the heels, and----"
"You might illustrate--with some fragile, concrete object, like an egg--as to what would happen if he fell out," said Sam, with exceeding mildness, "and----"
"In other words," she interrupted him triumphantly, "I ought to interfere _some_ of the time between cause and effect. The question being when to interfere and when not to."
"Exactly!" he said, planting an irrelevant kiss on the pink cheek nearest him. "And that, my dear Betty, is your job--and, of course, mine, when I'm here. But I still hold that the natural penalty is best--when it's convincingly painful yet entirely innocuous."
"What is the natural penalty for eating cookies out of the box when you've been forbidden to do it?" she wanted to know.
He chuckled as certain memories of his boyhood came back to him. "My word!" he said, "I wish I could ever taste anything half as good as the cookies out of Aunt Julia Brewster's crock--it was a cooky-crock in those days. Of course I was forbidden to go to it without permission, and also of course I did it."
"What happened?" she demanded, the mischief growing bolder in her eyes.
He reflected. "Aunt Julia wouldn't let me have any at table on several occasions; but I--er--regret to say that I was not duly impressed by the punishment. A cooky--one cooky--decorously taken from a china plate at the conclusion of a meal did not, in my youthful opinion, court comparison with six--eight--ten cookies, moist and spicy from their seclusion and eaten with an uncloyed appetite. Let's--er--change the subject for the moment, my dear. Of course I'm right, but I appear to be hopelessly treed. Tell me how our friend Miss Tripp is getting on. She appeared somewhat depressed at dinner-time, and I didn't like to ask for information for fear there was nothing doing."