e never nevers. The latter were mostly beyond me. Though
you may halt one sinner in the act of throwing a stone at another,
there is little reason to believe that he will not soon be trying his
aim again.

I like children when they are polite and a little reticent, when they
are not too much in evidence, and when the whole household is not made
to revolve about them.

Fulton once said to me, in that shy yet eager way of his: "If only I
could arrest my babies' development; keep them exactly as they are; on
tap when I wanted them, and hibernated like a couple of little bears
when I was busy and mustn't be disturbed! They should never change,
while I lived, if I had my way. And I'd promise not to abuse my
privileges. I'd only take 'em out of the ice box when I absolutely
needed them and couldn't do without them."

It was the first time that I ever was in the Fulton house that he said
that. The two babies, a boy and a girl, Jock and "Hurry," two
roly-polies, with their mother's eyes and mischievous smile, had been
brought in to the tea table to be polite and share a lump of sugar.
And they had been very polite, and had shown the proper command over
their shyness, and had shaken me decorously by the hand, and made their
funny grave little bows and asked me how I did. And I had said
something in praise of the little girl to her face, and Fulton had
reproached me a little for doing so.

"In India," he had said, "it is very bad luck to praise a child to its
face, very bad luck indeed."

"I'm so sorry," I said, when the children had gone. "I ought to have
remembered that even very little babies in the cradle understand
everything that's said to them. May I praise them now? Because they
are the two most delicious babies in the world. I'd like to eat them."

"When I'm tired or worried," said Fulton, his eyes lighting with
tenderness, "Hurry always knows. And she comes and climbs into my lap
and leans against me without saying a word, and she keeps creepy-mouse
still until she knows that I'm feeling better. Then she chuckles, and
I hug her. Sometimes I wish that she was made like a tennis ball; then
I could hug her as hard as I wanted to without hurting her."

While he was speaking, Mrs. Fulton looked all the time at her husband's
face. I remember thinking, "God! If ever some woman should look at me
like that!" Her mouth smiled mischievously, just the way little
Hurry's smiled, and her eyes--I won't try to