"Oh, it's a candy cane!" she said, calling it a candy cane commonly, with not even a hush of tone, as one would say "a brick house" or "a gold watch," or anything. She, promptly detecting his disappointment at her coldness, tried to simulate the fervour of an initiate, but this may never be done so as to deceive any one who has truly sensed the occult and incommunicable virtue of the candy cane. For one thing, she kept repeating the words "candy cane" baldly, whenever she could find a place for them in her soulless praise; whereas an initiate would not once have uttered the term, but would have looked in silence. Another initiate, equally silent by his side, would have known him to be of the brotherhood. Perhaps at the end there would have been respectful wonder expressed as to how long it would stay unbroken and so untasted. Still he was not unkind to her, except in ways requisite to a mere decent showing forth of his now ascertained superiority. He helped her to a canter on the new horse; and even pretended a polite and superficial interest in the doll, Fragile, which she took up often. Being a girl, she had to be humoured in that manner. But any boy could see that the thing went to sleep by turning its eyes inside out, and its garters were painted on its fat legs. These things he was, of course, too much the gentleman to point out.
When the Doctor and his host came down stairs late in the afternoon, the little boy and girl were fairly friendly. Only there was talk of kissing at the door, started by the little girl's uncle, and this the little boy of course could not consider, even though he suddenly wished it of all things—for he had never kissed any one but his father and mother. He had told Clytie it made him sick to be kissed. Now, when the little girl called to him as if it were the simplest thing in the world, he could not go. And then she stabbed him by falsely kissing the complacent Allan standing by, who thereupon smirked in sickening deprecation and promptly rubbed his cheek.
Not until the pair were out in the street did his man-strength come back to him, and then he could only burn with indignation at her and at Allan. He wondered that no one was shocked at him for feeling as he did. But, as they seemed not to notice him, he rode his horse again. No mad gallop now, but a slow, moody jog—a pace ripe for any pessimism.
"Clytie!" he called imperiously, after a little. "Do you think there's a real bone in this horse—like a regular horse?"
Clytie responded from the dining-room with a placid "I guess so."
"If I sawed into its neck, would the saw go right into a real bone?"
"My suz! what talk! Well?"
"I know there ain't any bone in there, like a regular horse. It's just a wooden bone."
Nor was this his last negative thought of the day. It came to him then and there with cruel, biting plainness, that no one else in the house felt as he did toward his chief treasure. Allan didn't. He had spent hardly a moment with it. Clytie didn't; he had seen her pick it up when she dusted the sitting-room; there was sacrilege in her very grasp of it; and his grandfather seemed hardly to know of its existence. The little girl who had chosen the good name of Lillian May might have been excused; but not these others. If his grandfather was without understanding in such a matter, in what, then, could he be trusted?
He descended to a still lower plane before he fell asleep that night. Even if he had one of them, he would probably never have a whole row, graduated from a pigmy to a mammoth, to hang on a wire across the front window, after the manner of the rich, and dazzle the outer world into envy. The mood was but slightly chastened when he remembered, as he now did, that on last Christmas he had received only one pretentious candy rooster, falsely hollow, and a very uninteresting linen handkerchief embroidered with some initials not his own. He fell asleep on a brutal reflection that the cane could be broken accidentally and eaten.