You look like him, Penrod. He was anything but a handsome boy."
After this final bit of reminiscence--probably designed to be repeated
to Mr. Schofield--she disappeared in the direction of the kitchen,
and returned with a pitcher of lemonade and a blue china dish sweetly
freighted with flat ginger cookies of a composition that was her own
secret. Then, having set this collation before her guests, she presented
Penrod with a superb, intricate, and very modern machine of destructive
capacities almost limitless. She called it a pocket-knife.
"I suppose you'll do something horrible with it," she said, composedly.
"I hear you do that with everything, anyhow, so you might as well do it
with this, and have more fun out of it. They tell me you're the Worst
Boy in Town."
"Oh, Aunt Sarah!" Mrs. Schofield lifted a protesting hand.
"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Crim.
"But on his birthday!"
"That's the time to say it. Penrod, aren't you the Worst Boy in Town?"
Penrod, gazing fondly upon his knife and eating cookies rapidly,
answered as a matter of course, and absently, "Yes'm."
"Certainly!" said Mrs. Crim. "Once you accept a thing about yourself
as established and settled, it's all right. Nobody minds. Boys are just
people, really."
"No, no!" Mrs. Schofield cried, involuntarily.
"Yes, they are," returned Aunt Sarah. "Only they're not quite so awful,
because they haven't learned to cover themselves all over with little
pretences.
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