# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 40

NO mother, through the passing of the ages, has been able to discover why bad manners are so catching and permanent, yet how you may leave your sweet-spoken, grammatical child with a surly ungrammatical one, and not even a proper word or a single "g" will rub off upon the one who needs it. It would be a lovely world if righteousness and good manners were as catching as unrighteousness and bad manners!
With each successive year Alice felt that it would be easy to educate children on a desert island, in fact her whole feeling on the matter might have been summed up in the one phrase: If it were not for their little friends—
"Why," she wailed to her husband, "can't they learn any of the good things from them?" She said this after she had announced that if another child of hers said, "Ish kabibble," well—he should see what he should see. By Alice's voice one gathered that he should see things of the most terrifying kind, and, indeed, might very well not all rest with seeing, but would be doings also—they, too, of an unpleasant nature.
"They caught it from Bobby Morris," she explained to Tom.
"You speak as if it were the chicken pox," he replied, with that misplaced facetiousness so irritating in fathers and husbands.
"Chicken pox!" cried Alice. "Chicken pox! I wish it were the chicken pox; it's not dangerous and they get over it. Chicken pox doesn't poison the well-springs ​of one's existence like 'Ish kabibble,' and 'I'll say so.' Do you think it's any fun to bring up children to speak decent English, and then have their conversation strewn with 'ain'ts'? Do you think I like to hear Robert talking about his friends as 'de guys' and 'de ginks'? I told him if I ever heard him say 'de' for 'the' again that he would have to reckon with you. Do you suppose it was pleasant when he called me a 'short sport'? Jamie has made up a rhythm to 'kabibble'; and he sings: 'Ka-bibble, ka-bibble,' and since Sara has been playing with the Williams it is as if they had taken every 'g' she had in the world and thrown them out of the window."
"It is because you have been kept too closely at home," Tom finally announced, "that you mind it so much. You've been talking about going on a vacation by yourself the last five years. Now, will you finally go?"
"I think I will," Alice agreed. She wrote for rooms by the seashore. She made all her arrangements, and yet as the time for her departure approached, she saw with ever deeper clarity the shortcomings of her children's friends. She tried to be fair; she told herself repeatedly that her children's faults were just as bad as any one else's,—worse—but this remained in that realm of facts which one knows merely with the top of one's head.
Gladys Grayson would come and play with the Marceys, and, departing, she would leave behind her the horrid legacy, her whine. How Sue Grayson stood Gladys' whine was a thing Alice never could fathom. Her own children never whined, except after playing with Gladys, and then Alice could be sure that Sara at bedtime would say with a nasal drawl: "Do-I-have-to-go-to-bed?"
Alice could not face it. She knew what would happen when she got back. The g's would be gone for good; the ​whines would have come to stay. She wrote a second letter to see if the cottage they had the year before was still vacant.
"What is the use of my going away," she told Tom, "if I'm going to worry about them every minute?" He didn't argue with her.