eet an engagement; Roxy would arrive just as the
lamp or a window went to irremediable smash.

Tom got all the petting, Chambers got none. Tom got all the delicacies,
Chambers got mush and milk, and clabber without sugar. In consequence
Tom was a sickly child and Chambers wasn't. Tom was "fractious," as Roxy
called it, and overbearing; Chambers was meek and docile.

With all her splendid common sense and practical everyday ability, Roxy
was a doting fool of a mother. She was this toward her child--and she
was also more than this: by the fiction created by herself, he was
become her master; the necessity of recognizing this relation outwardly
and of perfecting herself in the forms required to express the
recognition, had moved her to such diligence and faithfulness in
practicing these forms that this exercise soon concreted itself into
habit; it became automatic and unconscious; then a natural result
followed: deceptions intended solely for others gradually grew
practically into self-deceptions as well; the mock reverence became real
reverence, the mock homage real homage; the little counterfeit rift of
separation between imitation-slave and imitation-master widened and
widened, and became an abyss, and a very real one--and on one side of it
stood Roxy, the dupe of her own deceptions, and on the other stood her
child, no longer a usurper to her, but her accepted and recognized
master. He was her darling, her master, and her deity all in one, and in
her worship of him she forgot who she was and what he had been.

In babyhood Tom cuffed and banged and scratched Chambers unrebuked, and
Chambers early learned that between meekly bearing it and resenting it,
the advantage all lay with the former policy. The few times that his
persecutions had moved him beyond control and made him fight back had
cost him very dear at headquarters; not at the hands of Roxy, for if she
ever went beyond scolding him sharply for "forgett'n' who his young
marster was," she at least never extended her punishment beyond a box on
the ear. No, Percy Driscoll was the person. He told Chambers that under
no provocation whatever was he privileged to lift his hand against his
little master. Chambers overstepped the line three times, and got three
such convincing canings from the man who was his father and didn't know
it, that he took Tom's cruelties in all humility after that, and made no
more experiments.

Outside the house the two boys were tog