earth triumphantly, and passing secure through the pitfalls which lie in wait for children. Alice did not suspect that he was growing a character after his own pattern, the design of which she had no more to do with in the choosing than the color of his eyes or whether he was to be a boy or a girl.
She thought that the hardest part of being a mother was behind her. Teething was over. They had passed that dark spot which in the eyes of anxious young mothers is dotted with small white gravestones and which is known as the Second Summer. Yet there was Robert, hatching a plot that was to kill her complacency forever. He diverted her mind from what he was about by having infantile ailments; by getting weaned, by changes of diet, by learning to walk, growing his personality behind his mother's back.
In the back of her mind she knew that she had been begging the question, and that for a long time this definite personality had been looking at her level-eyed. She had made excuses to herself about it. When the personality showed itself unpleasantly she had explained it with, "Robert isn't feeling well to-day." It flickered in and out of her range of vision, like a will-o'-the-wisp, now staying for half an hour, now vanishing and leaving behind the good baby that regular training had made Robert.
If Alice had wanted to look the fact squarely in the face, she could have seen for some time past Robert was no longer a little mechanism. His conduct had become like bacon, now fat and now lean. Only the other day he had sat down beside the road, and when Alice had told him to come along, he said with his disconcerting tranquilliity:
"I like it here." When Alice had asked him if he would come walking like a man or be carried like a
