Page:The Fun of It.pdf/23

Rh uals who are fit, despite dire predictions to the con­trary.

I know that I worried my grandmother consid­erably by running home from school and jumping over the fence which surrounded her house.

“You don’t realize”, she said to me one day, “that when I was a small girl I did nothing more strenu­ous than roll my hoop in the public square.”

I felt extremely unladylike, and went around by the gate for several days in succession. Probably if I’d been a boy, such a short cut would have been entirely natural. I am not suggesting that girls jump out of their cribs and begin training, but only that the pleasure from exercise might be enhanced if they knew how to do correctly all the things they can now do without injuring themselves or giving a shock to their elders.

Of course, I admit some elders have to be shocked for everybody’s good now and then. Doing so, sometimes is a little hard on the shockers, however. I know this for my sister and I had the first gym­nasium suits in town. We wore them Saturdays to play in, and though we felt terribly “free and athletic”, we also felt somewhat as outcasts among the little girls who fluttered about us in their skirts. No one who wasn’t style conscious twenty-five years ago can realize how doubtfully daring we were.

Along with bloomers, coasting while lying flat on the sled was considered rough for girls. Such ab­surdities, when I looked back on them, make me