After this final bit of reminiscence—­probably designed to be repeated to Mr. Schofield—­she disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, and returned with a pitcher of lemonade and a blue china dish sweetly freighted with flat ginger cookies of a composition that was her own secret.  Then, having set this collation before her guests, she presented Penrod with a superb, intricate, and very modern machine of destructive capacities almost limitless.  She called it a pocket-knife.

“I suppose you’ll do something horrible with it,” she said, composedly.  “I hear you do that with everything, anyhow, so you might as well do it with this, and have more fun out of it.  They tell me you’re the Worst Boy in Town.”

“Oh, Aunt Sarah!” Mrs. Schofield lifted a protesting hand.

“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Crim.

“But on his birthday!”

“That’s the time to say it.  Penrod, aren’t you the Worst Boy in Town?”

Penrod, gazing fondly upon his knife and eating cookies rapidly, answered as a matter of course, and absently, “Yes’m.”

“Certainly!” said Mrs. Crim.  “Once you accept a thing about yourself as established and settled, it’s all right.  Nobody minds.  Boys are just people, really.”

“No, no!” Mrs. Schofield cried, involuntarily.

“Yes, they are,” returned Aunt Sarah.  “Only they’re not quite so awful, because they haven’t learned to cover themselves all over with little pretences.  When Penrod grows up he’ll be just the same as he is now, except that whenever he does what he wants to do he’ll tell himself and other people a little story about it to make his reason for doing it seem nice and pretty and noble.”

“No, I won’t!” said Penrod suddenly.

“There’s one cookie left,” observed Aunt Sarah.  “Are you going to eat it?”

“Well,” said her great-nephew, thoughtfully, “I guess I better.”

“Why?” asked the old lady.  “Why do you guess you’d ’better’?”

“Well,” said Penrod, with a full mouth, “it might get all dried up if nobody took it, and get thrown out and wasted.”

“You’re beginning finely,” Mrs. Crim remarked.  “A year ago you’d have taken the cookie without the same sense of thrift.”

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing.  I see that you’re twelve years old, that’s all.  There are more cookies, Penrod.”  She went away, returning with a fresh supply and the observation, “Of course, you’ll be sick before the day’s over; you might as well get a good start.”

Mrs. Schofield looked thoughtful.  “Aunt Sarah,” she ventured, “don’t you really think we improve as we get older?”

“Meaning,” said the old lady, “that Penrod hasn’t much chance to escape the penitentiary if he doesn’t?  Well, we do learn to restrain ourselves in some things; and there are people who really want someone else to take the last cookie, though they aren’t very common.  But it’s all right, the world seems to be getting on.”  She gazed whimsically upon her great-nephew and added, “Of course, when you watch a boy and think about him, it doesn’t seem to be getting on very fast.”