He'd never see daylight again; that's all!" The barber dug ten active fingers into the helpless scalp before him and did his best to displace it, while the anguished Penrod, becoming instantly a seething crucible of emotion, misdirected his natural resentment into maddened brooding upon what he would do to a boy "twice his size" who should dare to call him "little gentleman." The barber shook him as his father had never shaken him; the barber buffeted him, rocked him frantically to and fro; the barber seemed to be trying to wring his neck; and Penrod saw himself in staggering zigzag pictures, destroying large, screaming, fragmentary boys who had insulted him.
The torture stopped suddenly; and clenched, weeping eyes began to see again, while the barber applied cooling lotions which made Penrod smell like a coloured housemaid's ideal.
"Now what," asked the barber, combing the reeking locks gently, "what would it make you so mad fer, to have somebody call you a little gentleman?
It's a kind of compliment, as it were, you might say.

What would you want to hit anybody fer THAT fer ?" To the mind of Penrod, this question was without meaning or reasonableness.

It was within neither his power nor his desire to analyze the process by which the phrase had become offensive to him, and was now rapidly assuming the proportions of an outrage.

He knew only that his gorge rose at the thought of it.
"You just let 'em try it!" he said threateningly, as he slid down from the chair.

And as he went out of the door, after further conversation on the same subject, he called back those warning words once more: "Just let 'em try it! Just once--that's all _I_ ask 'em to.