His mother went to her bedroom and narrated the affair to her husband. Johnathan was for thrashing the boy soundly at once.
“No—you’ve given him one whipping to-day and one whipping a day is enough. I think I’ve scared him so badly that he won’t think of the subject again. And to-morrow I shall certainly see Billy’s mother. If she doesn’t chastise her dirty-minded young one, I shan’t let Nathan go on playing with him.”
Grumbling, John Forge was persuaded. Next day Mrs. Forge went into indignant session with my mother.
“Yes, Billy catechised me in the same way,” the latter responded. “I told him what I thought it sane and reasonable to tell a lad of his years. He’ll learn it outside, anyway. Probably he’ll get a sordid, vulgar, perverted version. I don’t believe you can scare these things from the minds of live-wire children, nor stifle the most normal impulses of growing boyhood. I for one shan’t try. As my boy grows I want him to feel that he can come to his mother at any time with his problems, especially his girl problems, without having the immortal daylights scared out of him or made to feel that he’s a criminal. It ain’t natural, Anna Forge, and so it ain’t common sense.”
“My boy shall not go on playing with yours, if that’s the sort of thing they’re talking.”
“Suit yourself, Anna Forge. I believe your philosophy’s wrong and you’ll live to rue it.”
“I don’t have to be told what’s decent for my own young one!”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. That’s yet to be proven.”
Anna Forge stalked homeward. The two women did not speak for a month. But Nat’s mother had done a malicious thing that day. She had only turned the barb of my friend’s curiosity inward and prodded that worst enemy of the human race to attack her small son viciously: Repression.