One day, the children had wanted to get up onto General Burnside's horse.
They wanted to see what his back felt like- the General's.
He looked so comfortable being straight.
They wanted to touch the mystery.
Arlene was boosting them up when the policeman came by.

He was very rude.

Arlene had a hard voice, too, this time.
The policeman's eyes rather popped for a second; but then Arlene got another tone in a hurry, and she said, "If it wasn't for these dear children"-.

The policeman got a confused, funny look on his face, and he had answered kind of politely, "Now, look here, lady: I know you got to entertain these kids and all.
But this is a public park and it's a city ordinance that the statues cannot be crawled on".

Arlene was so ashamed that she hung her head when she said, "Yes, sir".

The policeman walked on, but he looked back once.

That had happened on the day when two other unusual things had occurred.
Arlene had taught them a new way to have fun in their little private area; and they had told their mother about the tumbles.
In matters of exact information, that kept her one step behind developments; and so they were consistently true to their principles.

"Never mind", Arlene had said, after the policeman had left, having pursued the usual unco-operative course of grownups.
"Never mind.
I know something that is much more fun that we can do on our little lawn".

"What is it"? asked the children, whose reflexes and replies were invariably so admirably normal and predictable.
Maybe that was why they were cordial and loyal towards the unpredictability of Arlene.

"Just you wait", advised Arlene, echoing the dialogue in a recent British movie.

And when they had got to their little lawn, they had had a most twirlingly magnificent time.
First, Arlene had put them through some rapid somersaults.
They had protested that that wasn't any surprise.

"Just you wait", said Arlene again, as though she were discovering the pleasantly tingling insinuations of that handy little sturdy statement.
"This is a warm-up".

"Is it anything like cooked-over oatmeal"? asked one of the children.

"Not the least bit", Arlene snapped.
One of the many things that was so nice about her was that she always took your questions seriously, particularly your very, very serious questions.
Those were especially the ones that all other grownups laughed at loudest.
She would sometimes even get a little hard on you, she took you so seriously.
But not hard for very long.
Just long enough to make you feel important.

"Now", said Arlene, eventually, making them both sit in formation on a big root of a live oak, the sort of root that divided itself and made their bottoms sag down and feel comfortable.
"Now, we're going to be like what General Burnside and his horse make us think of".

The children looked at each other and sagged their bottoms down even more comfortably than ever.
Their curiosity went happily out of bounds.

Then, Arlene threw herself backwards and wiggled in a way that was just wonderful.
She held herself that way and turned her head towards them and laughed and winked.
"Imagine being able to laugh and wink when you're like the top part of that picture frame at home", one of them said.
They both laughed and winked back.

"I'm General Burnside's horse, upside down", Arlene said, sort of gaspingly, for her: even she had to breathe kind of funny when she was in that position.
She made General Burnside's horse's belly do so funny when it was upside down.
Then, she was back on her feet, winking and smiling that enormous smile (she had lots of wonderful big teeth that you never would have suspected she had when she was not smiling).
And she would wink and throw kisses.
They both tried to keep smiling and winking for a long time, but it made their lips and eyelids tremble.
But they kept on clapping for a long, long time.

"This time", Arlene said, and she even kept on wiggling a little bit while she was just talking, "you're going to tell me what I am and what I'm doing.
It all has something to do with General Burnside and his horse".

This time, it was so grand; they could tell exactly what it was.
It was General Burnside's horse running in a circle.
His legs shook, and the shaking went right on up his body through his hips to his shoulders.
"That's the General's horse", one of them cried out.

The other remarked, in a happy laughter, "That's a funny old horse".

The first one said, "He sure does shake.
He's old".

Then there was the General kissing his wife.
They had to be told that one.
But it was even funnier after they had been told.
Their father, when he came back from those many business trips, just bumped their mother on the forehead with his lips and asked if anybody had thought to mix the martinis and put them in the electric icebox.
But not General Burnside.
He was the funniest man.
He never could keep still, even when he didn't move his feet.

Then, they had to get up and be General Burnside.
Or his horse.
All they could think of was to run around in circles, kicking their legs out.
It wasn't very funny.
Then, they said General Burnside was going to jump over his horse's head; and they did some somersaults.
But that wasn't very funny, either.

"You ought to shake", Arlene advised them.
And Arlene showed them how to begin.
She also taught them to sing "I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate".
That helped a lot.
They were clumsy, but they were beginning to catch on.
They also caught on a little bit on how to smile a lot without your lips trembling.
"Imagine you won't get your allowance if you're caught not smiling- or smiling with your lips trembling too much", Arlene suggested.

That helped a great deal.

They were a little late in getting home.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Minks", Arlene said in a tone so low you could hardly hear it.

My mother constituted herself the voice of all of us.
"It's perfectly understandable, Arlene", my mother said in a friendly way.
"I suppose you all were playing and forgot"?

"Yes, ma'am", the children chorused heartily.

We couldn't help laughing.

The children rushed off to get rid of their sweaters; and Arlene began tapping the kitchen door open.
"Arlene's a good girl", my uncle remarked to us; but he said it too soon, for it came out just before the tap to which the door responded.
That tap had a slight bangish quality.

"She really is a dear little thing", my mother agreed.
Her upper lip lifted slightly.
She was biting into a small red radish; and that action always caused her to lift her lip from the sting of the thing.
Also, she lived in continual fear of finding a white worm curled up in a neat, mean little heap at the white center of the radish.
She would try to see over the bulge of her cheeks and somewhat under her teeth to the place where she was biting.
It never worked, naturally; but it made her look unusual.
Also, when she had bitten off half of the small radish, she found the suspense unbearable; and she would snatch the finger-held half of the radish out to where she could inspect it.
One could hear a very faint, ladylike sigh of relief.
Actually, it was inaudible to anyone not expecting it.
But the warm joy of her brown eyes was open to the general public.

Later on, the children told her further about somersaulting.
"It must be awfully good for them.
And awfully kind of Arlene", she told us later.
"But do you know something curious"? she added.
"I reached into that funny little pocket that is high up on my dress.
I have no notion why I reached.
And I found a radish.
Was it an omen?
I thought for a second.
But I would not pamper myself in that silly way.
I opened the window and threw the radish out".

Then, my mother blushed at this small lie; for she knew and we knew that it was cowardice that had made one more radish that night just too impossible a strain.

Arlene became indispensable; nobody could have told why.
But she was.
It was in the air.

A friend of my father's came to dinner.
He was passing through town and phoned to say hello.
As a result, he was persuaded out to dinner.
As a matter of fact, this happened every four or five months.
Sometimes, he coincided with my father's being at home.
Sometimes, as at this juncture, he did not.
But he was always persuaded out.

he liked children, in a loathsome kind of way; the two youngest in our family always had to be brought in and put through tricks for his entertainment.
When he had left, I could never remember whether he had poked them in their middles, laughingly, with a thick index finger or whether he was merely so much the sort of person who did this that one assumed the action, not bothering to look.
The children loathed him, too.

This evening, they were pushed in from the breakfast room, with odds and ends of dessert distributed over them.
There had been some coconut in it, for I remember my mother's taking a quick glance at a stringy bit of this nut on the cheek of one of them and then putting down her radish with a shiver.

They were pushed gently into the room by Arlene- whose only part appearing were hands that crept quickly back around to the kitchen side of the door.
We had just sat down.

"Tell Mr. Gorboduc what you're doing these days", my mother advised the children, ceremonially.

There was an air of revolt about the children- even irreverence for their own principles.
This could be told chiefly from a sort of head-tossing and prancing, a horselike balkiness of demeanor.
Possibly, the coconut-containing dessert had brought up bitter problems of administration.
But, at the beginning, this stayed just in the air.

"We go to the park with this nice lady", one of them said.
"We have good times".

This happy bulletin convulsed Mr. Gorboduc.
"You do"? he asked, between wheezes of laughter.
He was forced to wipe his eyes.
"You don't step on the flowers, do you?
Eh"?

One of the children maneuvered out of range of the poking index finger.

"No", he said.
"We don't".

Mr. Gorboduc took a swig of his sherry.
He was so long thinking that my mother had time to inspect her sherry for dregs.
Usually, this was done when attention was diverted by someone else's long, boring story.
But this time she was nervous: she was open.

Mr. Gorboduc was finally in command of his mind again.
"Tell me- what do you do at the park"? he asked.
This was delivered in a forthright way, without coyness and over-pretended interest- an admirable way with children.
Only, unfortunately, he could not remove from his voice a nagging insinuation of the direct command.
This nettled the children into the revelation of exact truth, a sacrifice of their secret superiority over grown people, but a victory in the wide fields of perpetration and illegitimate accomplishment.

"We bump", one said; and the other went on to development of the idea.
"We grind, too", he said.

My mother was beside herself with curiosity.
"Say that again", she pleaded.
She laughed a little and tossed the dregs rakishly around in her glass.
"You what"?
She could see that Mr. Gorboduc was intrigued; the hostess in her took over.
She was rollickingly happy.
"You what"?

My uncle looked at Mr. Gorboduc.
He read Henry James and used to pretend profundity through eye-beamings at people.

Mr. Gorboduc looked down.
He would not look up.
He was very funny about the whole thing.