I ran at her.  She leaped up, pealing laughter.  I began biting at her ankles ... at the calves of her legs ... “oof! oof!  I’m going crazy too!” She squealed, delighted, her mind taken off her troubles ... she struck me on the head with her open hands, to keep me off ...  I bowled her over with a swift, upward jump ...  I picked her up and carried her off, kissing her.

* * * * *

“My darling big rascal ... my own Johnnie Gregory!” She caught me fondly by the hair, “I can’t do anything with you at all!”

Once again, waking me up in the middle of the night: 

“Johnnie, I—­I have a dreadful impulse, an impulse to hit you ...  I just can’t help it, Johnnie dear!  I must do it!” and she fetched me a very neat blow in the face.

“You don’t mind, do you ... having your own little girl hit you?”

Now, poor Penton would have spent the remainder of the night taking this “impulse” and the act which followed it as a serious problem in aesthetics, economics, feminism, and what-not ... and the two would have talked and discussed, their voices sounding and sounding in philosophic disquisition ... and, before the end, Hildreth, persuaded to take the situation seriously and enjoying the morbid attention given her, Hildreth would have gone off several times into hysterics....

My procedure was a different one: 

“—­of course I don’t mind you following your impulses ... you should ... but also I have just as imperative an impulse—­now that you suggest it—­to hit you.”

And I was not chary of the vigorous blows I dealt her, a tattoo of them on her back....

“Why, Johnnie,” she gasped, “you—­hit—­me!” and her big eyes, wide with hurt, filled with tears.  And she cried a little....

“There, there, dear!” I soothed.  Then, with a solemn look in my face, “I couldn’t resist my impulse, either.”

“You mustn’t do that any more, Johnnie ... but,—­you must let me hit you whenever I want to.”

But she never had that “impulse” again.

* * * * *

But, though we romped a lot, Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel, and I,—­and though Hildreth called me her “Bearcat” (the only thing she took from the papers, whose title for me was “The Kansas Bearcat”) don’t think that this made up all our life in our cottage....

In the morning, after breakfast, which Daniel and I usually ate together alone, we being the early risers of the household—­I repaired to the large attic and wrote on my play.  Then frequently I read and studied till four, keeping up my Latin and Greek and German, and my other studies.

Darrie also wrote and studied in her room....  Daniel led the normal life of the happy American boy, going where the other boys were, and playing with them—­when he and I didn’t go off, as I have said, for the afternoon, together, crabbing and fishing.