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I now turned to the teacher and said protestingly, “That would have been a very little thing to do for a child.”

She laughed. “I’m not his nurse-maid. I’m his teacher,” she replied.

“That’s all very well, but his soup will be cold, you know, and he will be late to his luncheon!”

She did not deny this, but she did not seem as struck as I was by the importance of the fact. She answered whimsically, “Ah, one must remember not to obtrude one’s adult materialism into the idealistic world of children. He is so happy over his victory over himself that he wouldn’t notice if his soup were iced.”

The Morning Clean-up.

“But warm soup is a good thing, a very good thing,” I insisted, “and you have literally robbed him of his. More than that, I seem to see that all this insistence on self-dependence for children must interfere with a great many desirable regularities of family life.”

She looked at me indulgently. “Yes, warm soup is a good thing, but is it such a very important thing? According to our adult standards it is more palatable, but it’s really about as good food if eaten cold, isn’t it? And, anyhow, he eats it cold only this once. You’d snatch him away from his plate of warm soup without scruple if you thought he was sitting in a draught and would take cold. Isn’t his moral health as important as his physical?”