DRAWING THE LINE
There was on Master Tommy Whiffles’s face, as he came in from play, an expression of unalloyed satisfaction. He bounced down on the one sound spring of the sofa with a sigh so indicative of profound content that his father was instantly filled with misgivings.
Half an hour afterwards Dabbs, from the next street, strode up the garden path and gave a pull at the front-door bell.
“If I catch your boy playing war games within a mile of my place again,” he announced, “I’ll trounce him till his hide looks like the paint on a barber’s pole.”
“Steady, old fellow, steady,” advised Whiffles, senior. “It’s very stupid for you to throw out rash threats. What boy wouldn’t play war games nowadays, eh? Boys will be boys, you know.”
“Let him keep a boy, then,” snarled Dabbs; “it’s when he imagines himself a Prussian army corps and my greenhouse a cathedral that I draw the line.”