He was aware of his inability to express in words what he felt and wanted, and all his trouble and general dissatisfaction rose up and gripped hold of him.

“Oh, you can’t understand!” he burst out. “You can’t understand. You’re a girl. You like to be prim and neat, and to be good in deportment and ahead in your studies. You don’t care for danger and adventure and such things, and you don’t care for boys who are rough, and have life and go in them, and all that. You like good little boys in white collars, with clothes always clean and hair always combed, who like to stay in at recess and be petted by the teacher and told how they’re always up in their studies; nice little boys who never get into scrapes — who are too busy walking around and picking flowers and eating lunches with girls, to get into scrapes. Oh, I know the kind — afraid of their own shadows, and no more spunk in them than in so many sheep. That’s what they are — sheep. Well, I’m not a sheep, and there’s no more to be said. And I don’t want to go on your picnic, and, what’s more, I’m not going.”

The tears welled up in Bessie’s brown eyes, and her lips were trembling. This angered him unreasonably. What were girls good for, anyway? — always blubbering, and interfering, and carrying on. There was no sense in them.

“A fellow can’t say anything without making you cry,” he began, trying to appease her. “Why, I didn’t mean anything, Sis. I didn’t, sure. I — ”

He paused helplessly and looked down at her. She was sobbing, and at the same time shaking with the effort to control her sobs, while big tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“Oh, you — you girls!” he cried, and strode wrathfully out of the room.

 

CHAPTER II

 

“THE DRACONIAN REFORMS”

 

A few minutes later, and still wrathful, Joe went in to dinner. He ate silently, though his father and mother and Bessie kept up a genial flow of conversation. There she was, he communed savagely with his plate, crying one minute, and the next all smiles and laughter. Now that wasn’t his way. If he had anything sufficiently important to cry about, rest assured he wouldn’t get over it for days. Girls were hypocrites, that was all there was to it. They didn’t feel one hundredth part of all that they said when they cried. It stood to reason that they didn’t. It must be that they just carried on because they enjoyed it. It made them feel good to make other people miserable, especially boys. That was why they were always interfering.

Thus reflecting sagely, he kept his eyes on his plate and did justice to the fare; for one cannot scorch from the Cliff House to the Western Addition via the park without being guilty of a healthy appetite.

Now and then his father directed a glance at him in a certain mildly anxious way. Joe did not see these glances, but Bessie saw them, every one. Mr. Bronson was a middle-aged man, well developed and of heavy build, though not fat.