unfeeling or out of place under the circumstances (an aspect he
failed to consider), but because years of warfare had so
frequently made him connect cheerfulness on her part with some
unworthily won triumph over himself that habit prevailed, and he
could not be a witness of her high spirits without a strong sense
of injury. Additionally, he was subject to a deeply implanted
suspicion of any appearance of unusual happiness in her as having
source, if not in his own defeat, then in something vaguely "soft"
and wholly distasteful. She grated upon him; he chafed, and his
sufferings reached the surface. Finally, in a reckless moment, one
evening at dinner, he broke out with a shout and hurled a newly
devised couplet concerning luv-a-ly slush at his, sister's head.
The nurse was present: Cora left the table; and Hedrick later
received a serious warning from Laura. She suggested that it might
become expedient to place him in Cora's power.

"Cora knows perfectly well that something peculiar happened to
you," she advised him. "And she knows that I know what it was; and
she says it isn't very sisterly of me not to tell her. Now,
Hedrick, there was no secret about it; you didn't _confide_
your--your trouble to me, and it would be perfectly honourable of
me to tell it. I wont{sic} unless you make me, but if you can't be
polite and keep peace with Cora--at least while papa is sick I
think it may be necessary. I believe," she finished with imperfect
gravity, "that it--it would keep things quieter."

The thoughts of a boy may be long, long thoughts, but he cannot
persistently remember to fear a threatened catastrophe. Youth is
too quickly intimate with peril. Hedrick had become familiar with
his own, had grown so accustomed to it he was in danger of
forgetting it altogether; therefore it was out of perspective. The
episode of Lolita had begun to appear as a thing of the distant
and clouded past: time is so long at thirteen. Added to this, his
late immaculate deportment had been, as Laura suggested, a severe
strain; the machinery of his nature was out of adjustment and
demanded a violent reaction before it could get to running again
at average speed. Also, it is evident that his destruction had
been planned on high, for he was mad enough to answer flippantly:

"Tell her! Go on and tell her--_I_ give you leaf! _that_ wasn't
anything anyway--just helped you get a little idiot girl home.
What is there to that? I never saw her before;