One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, "I couldn't give them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!" They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished them and furtively put them back.
This year Steven cried, "Ma!" stretching out his hands toward the silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head. "No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart."
Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly spoon to play with. At meal-time he would not be parted from them, and Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived and grew fat.
Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months, without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the floor.
Harriet said worriedly to her husband, "I don't know what could be the matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!"
Richard tried to comfort her. "Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it."