Fanny glanced down at the torn pocket dangling untidily. “Oh, that!” she said airily. And, passing the kitchen table, deftly filched a slice of cold veal from the platter, and mounted the back stairs to her room. It was a hungry business, this fighting. When Mrs. Brandeis came in at six her small daughter was demurely reading. At supper time Mrs. Brandeis looked up at her daughter with a sharp exclamation.
“Fanny! There's a scratch on your cheek from your eye to your chin.”
Fanny put up her hand. “Is there?”
“Why, you must have felt it. How did you get it?”
Fanny said nothing. “I'll bet she was fighting,” said Theodore with the intuitive knowledge that one child has of another's ways.
“Fanny!” The keen brown eyes were upon her. “Some boys were picking on Clarence Heyl, and it made me mad. They called him names.”
“What names?”
“Oh, names.”
“Fanny dear, if you're going to fight every time you hear that name——”
Fanny thought of the torn sweater, the battered Zola, the scratched cheek. “It is pretty expensive,” she said reflectively.