"When a boy goes about bragging how many boys he has licked, and how many others he can lick, and how he will do this, that, and the other thing, if everybody doesn't look out, we say he is too conceited and he ought to have the conceit taken out of him; and the first good chance we get we take it out."
"Suppose you left it in him and paid no attention to it—what would happen in that case?" said the doctor.
"He would grow more and more conceited," said George, "and make himself so disagreeable that the boys couldn't enjoy life, and before a great while you would find him picking on smaller boys than himself and licking them, just to have more brag."
"Do you really have any such boys among your schoolfellows, or is this only theoretical?" the doctor inquired.
"There are a few," said George.
"And how do you determine whose duty it is to take the conceit out of one of them? Do you draw lots, or take turns?"
"The boy that enjoys the job the most generally gets it," said George.
"Just so," said the doctor. "And is there some one boy in the school who enjoys the job, as you call it, more than all the others?"
George evidently felt that this question came so near home he ought not to be expected to answer it, and he was silent.
His elder sister, Mary (they had lost their mother five years before), now spoke for the first time.