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a nickel each day until Sarah found out and became very angry,
for Sarah herself gave Nancy and Jasper only a penny for spend–
ing money and she felt that this gift of a nickel subverted her
own arrangement with her children.
"Whose children do you think they are, yours or mine?" ·said
Sarah. "Who is bringing up these children?"
Seymour too became close friends with Nancy and Jasper. He
teased them mercilessly, but also played games with them. He in–
vented a version of baseball which could be played with an old
football given to Jasper by
his
father. Seymour was one team and
Nancy and Jasper were the other, and the game was played in the
long hallway of the apartment. The game was played with an extra–
ordinary passion both by the children and by their young uncle.
Meanwhile the racket was such that the people who lived in the
apartment below knocked on the ceiling and finally complained to
the superintendent. Sarah objected because her hallway carpet was
being ruined.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," said Sarah to her
brother, "you ought to be ashamed to play games with children."
She did not understand that the fascination of the children
for Seymour was profound and the motive was Seymour's desire to
be a child himself. This was the reason that he teased Nancy and
Jasper in the way that he did. Nancy proved to be sturdy enough
to answer back in kind when he sought to make a fool of her, but
Jasper was sensitive to the point of illness and he wept when
h~
uncle said that he was a baby or he tried to hit him.
"Let the children alone," said Sarah and Rebecca, "play with
someone of your own age."
Seymour preferred the children. He had a strong hold on them
t
because he had newspapers all the time and the children wanted to
see the jokes. When displeased with them and when he wanted them
to run errands for him, Seymour used his ownership of the comic
strips as a kind of capital which made it possible for him to give
the children wages and rewards. He also used the jokes as a rr.eans
of turning the children against each other, for it often became a
question of who was to see the comics first, Nancy or J asper, and
Seymour tantalized the children, exacting concessions and prom"se<>
from them by raising the question of which of them was to get the
comics first. When he was displeased with.one of them, he amwurced
that the object of his displeasure was not to see the comic strip at
all, and although Rebecca, who was always moved by a strong sense
