"
"Suppose it was a boy twice your size?"
"Just let him try," said Penrod ominously. "You just let him try. He'd
never see daylight again; that's all!"
The barber dug ten active fingers into the helpless scalp before him
and did his best to displace it, while the anguished Penrod, becoming
instantly a seething crucible of emotion, misdirected his natural
resentment into maddened brooding upon what he would do to a boy "twice
his size" who should dare to call him "little gentleman." The barber
shook him as his father had never shaken him; the barber buffeted him,
rocked him frantically to and fro; the barber seemed to be trying to
wring his neck; and Penrod saw himself in staggering zigzag pictures,
destroying large, screaming, fragmentary boys who had insulted him.
The torture stopped suddenly; and clenched, weeping eyes began to see
again, while the barber applied cooling lotions which made Penrod smell
like a coloured housemaid's ideal.
"Now what," asked the barber, combing the reeking locks gently, "what
would it make you so mad fer, to have somebody call you a little
gentleman? It's a kind of compliment, as it were, you might say. What
would you want to hit anybody fer THAT fer?"
To the mind of Penrod, this question was without meaning or
reasonableness. It was within neither his power nor his desire to
analyze the process by which the phrase had become offensive to him,
and was now rapidly assuming the proportions of an outrage.
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