# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 19

WHEN the trying day finally came to an end Sara had the audacity to ask, "Do I need my bath. I've been so good?" Alice replied with a prompt asperity that was a great relief to her feelings:
"Indeed you do! You need one very much indeed!"
"But I have been so good," drawled Sara. "I've been a sweet child, haven't I, Father?" This sort of remark would annoy even the most deluded father.
"Yes, you have been so good," he replied with less spontaneity than he had shown, "and let's hear no more about it."
"About not bathing," Alice rapped out smartly.
"Aha!" cheered Robert. "You thought you'd get out of it."
"Don't nag your sister," his father advised him.
"Nag," thought Alice, "as if that honest child could nag!"
They were at the supper table when Sara came down from her bath. She wore no kimono over her nightgown; she had no slippers on her feet. She pranced in with the air of one who is naked and unashamed. Water, it seemed, had not washed her sins away, though it had melted off the outer veneer of virtue. It seemed that righteousness, after all, did not pay.
"Where are your slippers?" Robert inquired sternly.
"Upstairs," answered Sara, "and my kimono is up there, too," she went on, "and do you know why I left them? I left them upstairs because I wanted to! That's why I left them!"
​She looked from father to mother. "Now strike me with your wrath," her attitude seemed to say, "I don't care!" At this point it was with difficulty that Alice was restrained from embracing her daughter. Sara kissed all the family with joy, she had a humorous and defiant twinkle in her eye, and yet she kissed them as though she had come back from a long distance, and as though she was as glad as was Alice that she was through with attitudinizing. She kissed her family a second time. Robert was still unresponsive to her affection. He had suffered too much from her that day, and the fact that he did not know the name of his suffering had made it all the worse. He muttered ungraciously at his second embrace:
"If I went around with bare feet I'd be sent up-stairs."
"Yes, Sara, run along to bed," her father said.
She leaped from the room, poked her head back, threw kisses, poked her head back again and threw kisses again and again. There was an intensity in her gestures which made one realize that she had vitality enough to continue bouncing out from behind the door like a jack-in-the-box for half the night.
"Go to bed," her father urged. Then fell silence. One could feel Sara listening on the other side of the door. A swift exchange of intelligence passed between Tom and Alice, his lifted eyebrows meant as plainly as words:
"I'd better pay no attention to her."
Alice nodded. "Of course; don't notice her."
From behind the door rustlings, then a snicker. Still they did not notice her.
"I haven't gone to bed yet," suggested Sara.
"Go right along, Sara," her father said in that cheery ​tone that conveys to a child that it is going to obey orders as a matter of course.
Sara vanished; there was no sound of retreating feet, instead a rustle of a nightgown and giggle. Her parents said nothing. Presently they heard a voice as one talking to herself; it came from the stairs:
"I know my father told me to go to bed. I know he told me not to sit in my bare feet, but I am not going to, I'm not going to do what he says. I'm going to sit here, and sit here, and sit here!" it went on.