We pondered it. There was justice there, we saw that. But shut Margaret Amelia in a room! It was as ignominious as caging a captain.
“Did she cry?” we indelicately demanded.
“Awful,” said Betty. “She wouldn’t of cared if it had only been raining,” she added.
We looked hard at the sky. We should have been willing to have it rain to make lighter Margaret Amelia’s durance, and sympathy could go no further. But there was not a cloud.
It was Mary Elizabeth who questioned the whole matter.
“How,” said she, “does it do any good to shut her up in her room?”
We had never thought of this. We stared wonderingly at Mary Elizabeth. Being shut in your room was a part of the state of not being grown up. When you grew up, you shut others in their rooms or let them out, as you ruled the occasion to require. There was Grandmother Beers, for instance, coming out the door with scissors in her hands and going toward her sweet-pea bed. Once she must have shut Mother in her room. Mother!
Delia was incurably a defender of things as they are. Whenever I am tempted to feel that guardians of an out-worn order must know better than they seem to know, I remember Delia. Delia was born reactionary, even as she was born brunette.
“Why,” said she with finality, “that’s the way they punish you.”
Taken as a fact and not as a philosophy, there was no question about this.