Part 68

“You want something, Miss Toodles,” he accused with a formidable frown. “None of your wheedling ways with me! Out with it!”

“Candy,” said the child, in no way impressed by his severity.

“Candy, indeed! When?”

“Now. Any time. Lots of it. Lots of sugar, too.”

“Betty’s developing such a sweet tooth!” mourned her mother. “I have to limit her rigidly.”

“Why?”

“You wouldn’t let the child stuff herself on sweets all the time,” protested Grandma Sharpless, scandalized.

“Nor on anything else. But if she craves sweets, why not let her have them at the proper time?”

“Well, in my day children ate plain food and were thankful.”

“Hm! I’m a little dubious about the thankfulness. And in your day children died more frequently and more easily than in ours.”

“They weren’t pampered to death on candy, anyway!”

“Possibly they weren’t pampered quite enough. Take the Cherub, here,” he tossed Betty in the air and whisked her to his shoulder. “She’s a perfect little bundle of energy, always in motion. She needs energy-producing food to keep going, coal for that engine. Sugar is almost pure carbon; that is, coal in digestible form. Of course she wants sweets. Her little body is logical.”

“But isn’t it bad for her teeth?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“No; nor for her last year’s overshoes or her tin dog’s left hind leg,” chuckled the Health Master. “Sometimes I marvel that the race has survived all the superstitions surrounding food and drink.”

“In my father’s household,” said Mr. Clyde, “the family principle was never to drink anything with meals. The mixture of solids and liquids was held to be bad. Another superstition, I suppose.”

“At that rate, bread and milk would be rank poison,” said Dr. Strong. “Next to food, water has got the finest incrustation of old-wives’ warnings. Now, there’s some doubt whether a man should eat whenever he wants to. Appetite, in the highly nervous American organization, is sometimes tricky. But thirst is trustworthy. The normal man is perfectly safe in drinking all the water he wants whenever he wants it.”

“I can still remember the agonies that I suffered when, as a boy, I had scarlet fever, and they would allow me almost no water,” said Mr. Clyde.

“One of medicine’s direst errors,” said Dr. Strong. “Nobody will ever know how much that false and cruel system has added to our death-rate in the past. To-day a practitioner who kept water from a fever patient—unless there were unusual complications—would be properly citable for malpractice. By the way,” he continued, “we’re changing our views about feeding in long illnesses. Typhoid patients have always been kept down to the lowest possible diet, nothing but milk. Now, some of the big hospitals are feeding typhoid cases, right through the fever, on foods carefully selected for their heat and energy values, with the result that not only has the patient more strength to fight the disease, but he pulls through practically free from the emaciation which has always been regarded as inevitable.”

“Can I have my candy?” inquired Bettina, holding to her own point.

“If it’s good, sound candy. Now I’m going to utter an awful heresy. Generally speaking, and in moderation, what you want is good for you.”

“Pure anarchy,” laughed Mr. Clyde.

“Not at all; the law of the body, always demanding what is best for its development.”

“Well, I want,” declared Robin, with a sudden energy, “to take off these hot, scratchy flannels.”

“Too late now,” said the Health Master, “until spring. You’ve been wearing them all winter. But another year, if I have my way, you won’t have to put them on.”

“You’d let him tempt pneumonia by going through a winter with light summer underwear?”

“Unless you get out an injunction against me,” smiled the physician. “Bobs had a pretty tough time of it for the first week when he changed to flannels. He’s thin-skinned, and the rough wool irritated him pretty badly. In fact, he had a slight fever for two days. It isn’t worth that suffering. Besides, he’s a full-blooded youngster, and doesn’t need the extra warmth. You can’t dress all children alike in material any more than you can dress them all from the same pattern.”

“Then I want to leave off mine, too,” announced Charles.

“Nonsense! You little ruffian, you could wear sandpaper on that skin of yours. Don’t talk to me, or next time I see you without your overcoat I’ll order a hair shirt for you.”