"Anyway," she said quickly, "they are excellent scones."
"Most excellent scones," I hastened to add, "but my point is that if we all follow our parents there will be no progress."
"Progress will never bring better scones," said Mac and he patted his wife's cheek.
"Mac," I said gallantly, "your wife has brought scones to their perfect and utmost evolution. She has made the super-scone. Only, Helen isn't a scone you know."
At this point Helen was found trying to pull the marble clock down from the mantlepiece. Her mother rescued the clock as it was falling, and she scolded the fair Helen.
"You are all theory," she cried to me. "What would you do in a case like this?"
"Same as you did," I answered hastily, and then added: "Only I would try to give her so many interesting things to play with that she'd forget to want the clock."
Then Mrs. Mac indignantly dragged out Helen's toys from a cupboard.
"Dozens of them!" she cried, "and she is tired of every one."
Then I discoursed on toys. The toys of the world are nearly all bad. Helen has a beautiful sleeping doll that cost five pounds; rather I should say that Helen had a beautiful sleeping doll that cost five pounds. On the one occasion that Helen was allowed to play with it she made a careful attempt to open the head with a pair of scissors to see what made the eyes close and open. Then her mother put the doll in a box, packed the box in a trunk, and explained to Helen that the doll was to lie in that trunk until Helen had a little baby girl of her own.