# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 39

A SURPRISING thing happened: The boys who always swarmed over the Marcey place diminished in numbers. Apparently the sight of the swing was too much for them. Only a few jealous souls stayed behind, and these cried to the girls, alluringly, words which had never passed their lips before in their lives.
"Come on and play cops and robbers with us! Come on and play yards off! Come on—we'll pull you up into the barn by the pulley!"
To all of this Sara, as spokesman, replied:
"We're playing the way my father told us to. We don't want to play those games."
"No!" cried out the bolder spirits, "you always hurt us—we always have to be It."
Pressure was brought to bear. A boy threw a horse chestnut which hit a doll on the head. Upon this Sara, puffed with virtue, approached her mother.
"Mother," she said, "do we have to play with the boys if we don't want to?"
"Certainly not," replied Alice. "When you little girls come in at half past four or quarter to five, the boys can use the swing. Until that time, as your father said, you can use it yourselves."
Sara's report of this interview was far from conciliatory.
"Ah-ha!" she said, "Robert Marcey,—ah-ha, William Travers Jenkins! Mother says we don't have to play with you. Mother says she'd rather have us play by ourselves. Go on off and play with Uncle Zotsby and ​his horrid dog—I don't want to know his name."
"Well," said Robert in an aggrieved tone, "I want to know why we can't play with you?"
"We're playing grown-up games," Sara gave back grandly.
"In grown-up games, aren't there school-teachers and aren't there fathers?" Robert wanted to know.
"Yes," Sara replied with bitter logic, "in grown-up games they have those things, but we don't have to have them. We're only playing. We don't need you. You wait for your turn, and then you can have the swing," said she with maddening condescension.
This was the crux of it. They didn't need the boys any more. Not needing them, they didn't want them, and the boys, those free spirits forever escaping from the clutches of small girl animals, resented this state of things.
"Aw, come on!" the proud Robert was heard to beseech, "just let us play with you a little."
"No, we won't, Robert Marcey," responded his sister. "When you play with us you hurt us; you break everything; you make everything dirty; you want everything your own way."
She appealed to her mother again.
"Why should we let Robert in when we're having a good time like we are, and, anyway, Father said we don't have to?"
Perhaps Alice Marcey had the germs of feminism in her—who can tell? Maybe instead of being a feminist she had a sense of humor. At any rate her response was:
"No, darling, they don't need to play with you until you want them to."
"Well, we don't want them to," was Sara's pronunciamento; "we like it this way. Now we're happy—then ​we wouldn't be. They make fun of dolls. They'll take the swing away from us." There spoke a bitter knowl edge. "Tell them to go away, Mother."
Watching the crestfallen boys, Alice softened some what.
"If you boys and girls could manage to play together without quarreling," she began—but Sara cut her short.
"We can't! How can we? They knock us around—they want everything."
With this brief comprehensive word she returned to her playmates, and Alice went into the house, realizing that Sara had attained what women the world over ap parently are striving to attain—spiritual independence and the means of being self-supporting.