His mother could not understand his distress, for Larry had told her nothing of his encounter with Mop.
Throughout the evening there pounded through the boy's memory the terrible words, "He is a coward and his mother is a coward before him." Through his father's prayer at evening worship those words continued to beat upon his brain.

He tried to prepare his school lessons for the day following, but upon the page before his eyes the same words took shape.
He could not analyse his unutterable sense of shame.

He had been afraid to fight.

He knew he was a coward, but there was a deeper shame in which his mother was involved.

She was a Quaker, he knew, and he had a more or less vague idea that Quakers would not fight.