With friends, after such an outburst, you could never feel quite the same again. But with your relatives, such moments can be lived down—as once occurred in our own family when our father one hot summer day sent Geoffrey back to town to perform a forgotten errand. I had not heard of the event until I took my place at table.
“Where's Geoffrey?” said I.
“I sent him back to get a letter he forgot,” said my father.
“In all this heat?” I protested. “Well, if I had been in his place, I'd have gone away and stayed away.”
“Well, you could,” said my father serenely.
“Well, I will,” said Little Sunshine, and walked out of the door and up the street in a rage.
After you have left your parental home as suddenly as this, there comes a moment when you have the sensation of being what is termed “all dressed up with no place to go.” You feel that your decision, though sudden, is irrevocable, because going back would mean death to your pride. You try to fight off the practical thought that you can hardly go far without hat or scrip. Therefore, when Geoffrey met his eloping sister at the corner, it was with some little diplomacy that he learned my history and took me back to the table under his wing. The conversation barely paused as we took our places. Our father went on affably serving the salad to the just and the unjust alike. If, at this point, I had been treated with the contumely that I deserved, the memory would be unpleasant in the minds of all. As it is, the family now mentions it as the time when Margaret ran away to sea.
The only thing that can make minor friction hurtful is the disproportionate importance that it can assume when it is treated as a major issue, or taken as an indication of mutual dislike. It is often an indication of the opposite, though at the moment the contestants would find this hard to believe. Kept in its place, however, we find in it later a great deal of humorous charm, because it belongs to a period when we dealt with our brethren with a primitive directness not possible in later years. An intricate ambition, this matter of harmony in the home. Ideally, every family would like to have a history of uninterrupted adorations and exquisite accord. But growth implies change, change implies adjustment, and adjustment among varied personalities implies friction. Kept at the minimum, kept in its place, such friction does not estrange. Instead, it becomes a means to an intimate acquaintance with one another's traits and moods—an intimacy of understanding not far remote from love.
BOSTON STREETS
