“I don’t like to interfere,” replied Doris.  “I’m trying to figure out what it may mean.  He may have the makings of a sculptor in him.”  But one could see that she was a little worried, so I didn’t say the cheap and obvious thing, that at any rate he had the makings of a sculpture in him or would have in a few more days of self-expression.

Soft putty was put at his disposal, in case he might feel like doing a little modeling.  We didn’t expect much of him at first, of course; maybe just a panther or a little General Sherman; but if that was to be his metier we weren’t going to have it said that his career was nipped in the bud for the lack of a little putty.

* * * * *

The first thing that he did was to stop up the keyhole in the bath-room door while I was in the tub, so that I had to crawl out on the piazza roof and into the guest-room window.  It did seem as if there might be some way of preventing a recurrence of that sort of thing without submerging his individuality too much.  But Doris said no.  If he were disciplined now, he would grow up nursing a complex against putty and against me and might even try to marry Aunt Marian.  She had read of a little boy who had been punished by his father for putting soap on the cellar stairs, and from that time on, all the rest of his life, every time he saw soap he went to bed and dreamed that he was riding in the cab of a runaway engine dressed as Perriot, which meant, of course, that he had a suppressed desire to kill his father.

It almost seemed, however, as if the risk were worth taking if Junior could be shown the fundamentally anti-social nature of an act like stuffing keyholes with putty, but nothing was done about it except to take the putty supply away for that day.

The chief trouble came, however, in Junior’s contacts with other neighborhood children whose parents had not seen the light.  When Junior would lead a movement among the young bloods to pull up the Hemmings’ nasturtiums or would show flashes of personality by hitting little Leda Hemming over the forehead with a trowel, Mrs. Hemming could never be made to see that to reprimand Junior would be to crush out his God-given individuality.  All she would say was, “Just look at those nasturtiums!” over and over again.  And the Hemming children were given to understand that it would be all right if they didn’t play with Junior quite so much.

[Illustration:  Mrs. Deemster didn’t enter into the spirit of the thing at all.]

This morning, however, the thing solved itself.  While expressing himself in putty in the nursery, Junior succeeded in making a really excellent lifemask of Mrs. Deemster’s fourteen-months-old little girl who had come over to spend the morning with him.  She had a little difficulty in breathing, but it really was a fine mask.  Mrs. Deemster, however, didn’t enter into the spirit of the thing at all, and after excavating her little girl, took Doris aside.  It was decided that Junior is perhaps too young to start in on his career unguided.