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.