Jane, Critic

EVER since babyhood Jane has shown just enough of that sanitary acid quality that gives critical tone to a character. When she was eight months old, round and sweet, with a ‘ liquefactious ’ gurgle, she would sit in her carriage and look out upon the world with an occasional hint of irony in the depths of eyes that were not quite blue. Once, when she was beating on her tray with her feeding spoon, I was made to think, by a sudden mental shift, of a prominent leader of women striking her desk with her gavel.

At the age of three her qualities gave her a sort of position among the older children. A tumultuous baby fumbling at life, she often displayed in the face of a crisis a touch of dignity, a hint of inner poise, that was more protective than a strong fist or a summoning howl. Now, at eight and in full swing as a citizen of her world, she is not infrequently called in to arbitrate in the affairs of children older than herself.

‘ You yelled names at him first, Billy. I heard you,’ she tells her ten-year-old brother, emerging slightly battered from a conflict with an older boy.

Jane is not a prig, for she can apply the acid to herself with detachment, and toward the faults of others she frequently exhibits the tenderness that goes with a finer irony. Drawn up before the mirror and scrutinizing her gnomelike face, with its wide frontal gap, she said without passion or pity, ' I’m homely as anything, and I won’t be any prettier when I get big.’

Toward her ten-year-old brother Billy, a golden-hearted child with a lameness of tongue that makes him facile prey for the sprightly, she has assumed the rôle of interpreter, and seldom is she at loss for the right word at the right, moment. They come freshminted into her mind when she has need of them, and the stamp of childishness detracts but little from their dramatic fervor.

‘You’re a swiveling sneak,’ she hurled at a persecutor, the sinister hiss of the ,v’s touching off the epithet like the fuse of a bomb.

Jane’s humor is akin to irony. She laughs, to be sure, when the clown falls down and the motor carries on in spite of the loss of its aft quarter, but other and subtler phases fascinate her. I have never seen her so whole of heart in mirth as over a certain situation in Robinson Crusoe. Robinson had been telling Friday of the nature of God and the Devil, and Friday, with his fresh intelligence, asks, ‘If God much strong, why God not kill Devil, so make him no more wicked?’

Robinson is strangely surprised at his question and, ‘rising up hastily as upon some sudden occasion of going out,’ sends Friday for something a great way off. Jane threw herself upon the ground in a whirl of mirth. She had no words, being a child, for the tumult that was being created within her, but could only say over and over, ‘ It was funny though, was n’t it, Mommy, when Robinson sent Friday for something a long way off?’ Was it only Robinson’s discomfort that amused her, or did she detect the irony in a pretty arrangement of ideas toppled over by one light blow of intelligence?

The children are playing school.

‘June, you be teacher!’ Jane adjusts her slender body to the spirit of the role with a slight straightening of the spine and a grave down-curve of the upper lip. She will break down and laugh when Billy plays at being the very bad boy. She will not, as Anne would, assume the manner of a Caliban in managing her unruly brood. She carries with her even into the wildest play a hint of reserve, a delicate command, a quiet supremacy. Jane was bom with a gavel in her hand. Even now one may hear a faint tap-tapping amid the tumult and babble that accompany the dynamic fashioning of one human child.