THAT was the time when Alice began to realize that Robert was beginning to grow up.
One of the things that is the very hardest for mothers to find out is just how old their boy children are. The calendar and the clock have nothing to do with this, and it is partly the fault of parents that this is true. From earliest infancy they implore their boys to "be a man." That glorious goal is pointed out to a boy baby from the moment he can understand anything. He is not only told to "be a man", but to "be a man like Father." I often wonder how the fathers bear it; I often wonder how they can stand there, so smug and contented, when this ideal of conduct is suggested to their babies. Don't they really see themselves? Aren't there some of them who have a sudden, beneficent impulse to exterminate their own sons if the feat of growing up to be "a man like father" is all that awaits the child? How can they bear the adoring gaze of their sons?
Some little boys have a trick of looking so much more like real men with all the qualities that we love to think of as belonging to the most manly than grown-up men do. You see them stamping down the street, still in skirts; a man in the fullness of his powers couldn't have exemplified more fully the finer masculine traits.
Alice often wondered at herself and at Tom. She wondered why they never told Sara to "be a woman." No one tells little girls to "hurry up and be a woman
