"Well, then what do you think?"
I was still puzzled. "It looks as if it were the attitudes of people," I said; "but still there are a lot of unpleasant things about Bob. I don't know what to say."
"Well, I've been thinking it over, and this is the way that I've figured it out," said Bess. "It's something as if we held up a pair of scales, and weighed a person's attributes, without knowing that we did it. A pair of scales with two scoops, you know; and we throw into one or the other scoop, our impressions of him; the ideas we get from what we see him do and hear him say, the good things into one scoop and the bad things into the other. And then, if the good things weigh heaviest, we like him; and if the bad things make that side go down,—we don't."
"Fine!" I said. "That's exactly the way it is. Why, I've held up a scale that went way, way down on the bad side, and then seen the fellow do one really fine thing, and down would go the good side, and I'd wonder how I ever could have disliked any one who had it in him to do a thing like that." And then I remembered how it was when I had it in for Bob Stevens about a ball of
