I knew that the littlest things hurt just as much as the big.
My mother settled down, disconsolately, in her rocking chair, with a small, weeping burden in her arms, and rocked and sang.
"This is a dreadful family," she said, in between verses. "There is always a fuss."
As for Dick he made one more triumphant discovery before he finally subsided for the night.
"Girls are soft things," he declared, jealously, from his crib. "They are! They are!"
"Dick!" my father called from downstairs, "you stop that!"
Which settled the subject for the time being.
There was just one person in the family who was not upset, and that was my grandmother Harcourt. She read her Bible as usual, and watched us with grave eyes. She watched grandmother Lawrence buying pretty dresses by the dozen for Auntie May, and scolding violently, because they were not worn, and she watched granddad going about, with a perplexed face and a heavy heart, and even my own father laboriously concocting funny stories at which nobody laughed. When grandmother spoke her remarks were oracular.
"Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder," she said, with dignity.
And one day when things were at their very worst, and Auntie May had come to our house, "to cry in peace," as she said, grandmother Harcourt laid a small white note in her hand.