“She could swim,” I ventured timidly.

“Swim!  Even a fish can swim!”

I don’t know why, but at this conversation, the first of Jerry’s maturer years in which the topic had been woman, I felt a slight tremor go over me.  Jerry was too good to look at.  I fancied that there were many women who would have liked to see the flash of his eye at that moment and to meet his challenge with their wily arts.  In the pride of his masculine strength and capacity he scorned them as I had taught him.  I had done my work well.  Had I done it too well?’

“What are women anyway?” he stormed at me again.  “For what good are they?  To wash linen and have white arms like Nausicaa?  Who cares whether her arms were white or not?  They’re always weeping because they’re loved or raging because they’re not.  Love!  Always love!  I love you and Christopher and Radford and Skookums, but I’m not always whining about it.  What’s the use?  Those things go without saying.  They’re simply what are in a fellow’s heart, but he doesn’t talk about them.”

“Quite right.  Jerry.  Let’s say no more about it.”

“I’m glad there are no women around here, but now that I come to think of it, I don’t see why there shouldn’t be.”

“Your father liked men servants best.  He believed them to be more efficient.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” and then, suddenly:  “When I go out beyond the wall I’ll have to see them and talk to them, won’t I?”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“Well, I don’t want to.”

He paused a second and then went on.  “But I am a little curious about them.  Of course, they’re silly and useless and flabby, but it seems queer that there are such a lot of ’em.  If they’re no good, why don’t they pass out of existence?  That’s the rule of life, you tell me, the survival of the fittest.  If they’re not fit they ought to have died out long ago.”

“You can’t keep them from being born, Jerry,” I laughed.

“Well,” he said scornfully, “it ought to be prevented.”

I made a pretense of cutting the leaves of a book.  He was going too far.  I temporized.

“Ah, they’re all right, Jerry,” I said with some magnificence, “if they do their duty.  Some are much better than others.  Now, Miss Redwood, for instance, your governess.  She was kind, willing and affectionate.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, “she was all right, but she wasn’t like a man.”

I had him safe again.  Physical strength and courage at this time were his fetish.  But he was still thoughtful.

“Sometimes I think, Roger” (he called me Roger now, for after all I was more like an elder brother than a father to him), “sometimes I think that things are too easy for me; that I ought to be out doing my share in the work of the world.”

“Oh, that will come in time.  If you think things are too easy, I might manage to make them a little harder.”