society, as
maiden aunts who tipped you on the quiet, and grandmothers who mitigated
parental severity and knew the exquisite art of ginger snaps, crisp and
brown.

But before the skirted animal, which resembled but was quite unlike a
man, had atoned for the error of her birth, Skippy refused to take her
seriously. There were boys even younger than he who wore girls' jewelry,
who wrote and received what were called "mash notes," and who flaunted
these sentimentalities openly. He knew such incomprehensible males did
exist. There were three on his block and he had thrashed them all
soundly and been thrashed for having thrashed them, which of course
convinced him in his biblical estimate that women were created for the
confusion of man.

Skippy's prejudice was of long root. From an early age he had been
afflicted with sisters; one older and one younger, and he could find no
mitigating circumstances between the sister who could hit you and could
not be hit back, who never romped without pretending to howl, and the
sister who put you at your ease when you had tripped over the parlor
rug, by asking publicly:

"John, have you washed _behind_ your ears?"

The thought of girls was inalienably connected in his memory with
unnecessary washing up; with boring parties; with stiff collars; with
unending polishing of shoes; humiliating walks down the avenue,
stammering, idiotic phrases, while from every window the eyes of
malicious friends were set in mockery. Girls never slid down the
banisters or fell out of apple trees, or snapped garter snakes, or
raised white mice or collected splinters coasting down the icehouse
roof. Girls were always spruced up and shining; always covered with pink
ribbons and waiting for callers; always dressing and undressing; always
kissing their worst enemies in public instead of giving them a dig in
the ribs or treading on their toes and whispering under their breath:

"Wait till I catch you outside; I'll tear the hide off er yer!"

Girls spoiled vacations. It was on account of girls, to give them
something to do, that dancing schools were invented; that pews in
churches were stiff and uncomfortable; that ministers stormed and
threatened until the hour hand had gone its round. In a word, wherever
life was drab, or stiff, or formal, wherever prohibitions intervened to
check the young impulse, wherever the policing principle showed itself,
at the bottom somewhere the feminine sex must be the cause.