“I’m ’musing myself,” replied Wynne, sulkily.
“You amuse yourself with a ball, then, like anybody else.”
It is curious how closely a ball is associated with amusement. The average man is incapable of realizing entertainment that does not include the use of a ball. Reputations have been made and lost through ability or inability to handle it in the proper manner. A man is considered a very poor sort of fellow if he expresses disdain and contempt for the ball. Conceive the catastrophic consequences that would result if a law were passed forbidding the manufacture of balls? A shudder runs through the healthy-minded at the bare thought of such a thing.
Mr. Rendall’s anger can readily be appreciated, then, when his son made answer:
“There isn’t any fun in that.”
“No fun?” roared Mr. Rendall. “Time you got some proper ideas into your head, young fellow. Be ashamed of yourself! Fetch a ball from the nursery at once, and let me see you enjoying yourself with it, or you’ll hear something. Understand this, too—there’s not going to be any drawing in this household, or a lot of damn high-falutin artistic business either. Get that into your head as soon as you can. Be off.”
Ten minutes later, in a white heat of fury, Wynne was savagely kicking a silly woollen ball from one end of the grass patch to the other.
“That’s not the way,” said his father.
“Damn the ball,” screamed Wynne, and made his first acquaintance with a willow twig across the back.