got the best of it," said Solomon. "The
Prayer-book shows that. Don't I say every morning 'Blessed art Thou, O
Lord our God, who hast not made me a woman'?"

"I don't know whether you do say it. You certainly have got to," said
Esther witheringly.

"'Sh," said Solomon, winking in the direction of the grandmother.

"It doesn't matter," said Esther calmly. "She can't understand what I'm
saying."

"I don't know," said Solomon dubiously. "She sometimes catches more than
you bargain for."

"And then, _you_ catch more than you bargain for," said Rachel, looking
up roguishly from her knitting.

Solomon stuck his tongue in his cheek and grimaced.

Isaac came behind Levi and gave his coat a pull and toddled off with a
yell of delight.

"Be quiet, Ikey!" cried Esther. "If you don't behave better I shan't
sleep in your new bed."

"Oh yeth, you mutht, Ethty," lisped Ikey, his elfish face growing grave.
He went about depressed for some seconds.

"Kids are a beastly nuisance," said Levi, "don't you think so, Esther?"

"Oh no, not always," said the little girl. "Besides we were all kids
once."

"That's what I complain of," said Levi. "We ought to be all born
grown-up."

"But that's impossible!" put in Rachel.

"It isn't impossible at all," said Esther. "Look at Adam and Eve!"

Levi looked at Esther gratefully instead. He felt nearer to her and
thought of persuading her into playing Kiss-in-the-Ring. But he found it
difficult to back out of his undertaking to play I-spy-I with Solomon;
and in the end he had to leave Esther to her book.

She had little in common with her brother Solomon, least of all humor
and animal spirits. Even before the responsibilities of headship had
come upon her she was a preternaturally thoughtful little girl who had
strange intuitions about things and was doomed to work out her own
salvation as a metaphysician. When she asked her mother who made God, a
slap in the face demonstrated to her the limits of human inquiry. The
natural instinct of the child over-rode the long travail of the race to
conceive an abstract Deity, and Esther pictured God as a mammoth cloud.
In early years Esther imagined that the "body" that was buried when a
person died was the corpse decapitated and she often puzzled herself to
think what was done with the isolated head. When her mother was being
tied up in grave-clothes, Esther hovered about with a real thirst for
knowledge while the thoughts of all the other chil