, or guided, and he was to call us
"Doris" and "Monty" instead of "Mother" and "Father." We were to be just
pals, nothing more. Otherwise, his individuality would become submerged.
I was, however, to be allowed to pay what few bills he might incur until
he should find himself.

The first month that Junior was "on his own," striving for
self-expression, he spent practically every waking hour of each day in
picking the mortar out from between the bricks in the fire-place and
eating it.

"Don't you think you ought to suggest to him that nobody who really _is_
anybody eats mortar?" I said.

"I don't like to interfere," replied Doris. "I'm trying to figure out
what it may mean. He may have the makings of a sculptor in him." But one
could see that she was a little worried, so I didn't say the cheap and
obvious thing, that at any rate he had the makings of a sculpture in him
or would have in a few more days of self-expression.

Soft putty was put at his disposal, in case he might feel like doing a
little modeling. We didn't expect much of him at first, of course; maybe
just a panther or a little General Sherman; but if that was to be his
_metier_ we weren't going to have it said that his career was nipped in
the bud for the lack of a little putty.

* * * * *

The first thing that he did was to stop up the keyhole in the bath-room
door while I was in the tub, so that I had to crawl out on the piazza
roof and into the guest-room window. It did seem as if there might be
some way of preventing a recurrence of that sort of thing without
submerging his individuality too much. But Doris said no. If he were
disciplined now, he would grow up nursing a complex against putty and
against me and might even try to marry Aunt Marian. She had read of a
little boy who had been punished by his father for putting soap on the
cellar stairs, and from that time on, all the rest of his life, every
time he saw soap he went to bed and dreamed that he was riding in the
cab of a runaway engine dressed as Perriot, which meant, of course,
that he had a suppressed desire to kill his father.

It almost seemed, however, as if the risk were worth taking if Junior
could be shown the fundamentally anti-social nature of an act like
stuffing keyholes with putty, but nothing was done about it except to
take the putty supply away for that day.

The chief trouble came, however, in Junior's contacts with other
neighborhood chi