Evidently they
have weighed his food, measured his exercise, and bought his amusements;
his only free will and vent is to get in a temper. They give him no
chance to sweat off his irritation, only to fume; while that shaking,
snorting teakettle of an automobile they bowl him about in, puts the
final touch to his nervousness."
Then I sat down by father and watched the three boys together, while
Richard was preventing his guest from pounding a toad with a stone
because it preferred to hop away instead of being made into a dirt pie,
and I saw the truth of what he said. The seven-year-old child who went to
riding school, dancing school, and a military drill, did not know how to
express his emotions in play, and frozen snowballs and other cruelty was
his distorted idea of amusement. Poor rich boy, sad little only son, he
was not allowed the freedom to respond to the voice of nature even as the
tenement children that dance in the streets to the hand-organs or stir
the mud in the gutter with their bare toes. It is not the tenement
children of New York who are to be pitied; it is those that are being
fitted to keep the places, in the unstable and frail crafts of the
Whirlpool, that their parents are either striving to seize or struggling
to reserve for them.
At the end of half an hour the boys came back to the porch, all three
delightfully and completely dirty, and clamouring that they were hungry.
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