"That's so," she said, and reflected how often one used that phrase in response to one of Paul's solid and unanswerable statements.
Mark appeared just then and she began to laugh helplessly. His hands were wetly, pinkly, unnaturally clean, but his round, rosy, sunny little face was appallingly streaked and black.
Paul did not laugh. He said in horrified reproach, "Oh, Mark! You never touched your face! It's piggy dirty."
Mark was staggered for a moment, but nothing staggered him long. "I don't get microbes off my face into my food," he said calmly. "And you bet there aren't any microbes left on my hands." He went on, looking at the table disapprovingly, "Mother, there isn't a many on the table this day, and I wanted a many."
"The stew's awful good," said Paul, putting away a large quantity.
"'Very,' not 'awful,' and don't hold your fork like that," corrected Marise, half-heartedly, thinking that she herself did not like the insipid phrase "very good" nor did she consider the way a fork was held so very essential to salvation. "How much of life is convention, any way you arrange it," she thought, "even in such an entirely unconventional one as ours."
"It is good," said Mark, taking his first mouthful. Evidently he had not taken the remarks about his face at all seriously.
"See here, Mark," his mother put it to him as man to man, "do you think you ought to sit down to the table looking like that?"
Mark wriggled, took another mouthful, and got up mournfully.
Paul was touched. "Here, I'll go up with you and get it over quick," he said. Marise gave him a quick approving glance. That was the best side of Paul. You could say what you pleased about the faults of American and French family life, but at any rate the children didn't hate each other, as English children seemed to, in novels at least. It was only last week that Paul had fought the big French Canadian boy in his room at school, because he had made fun of Elly's rubber boots.