Youth can't know everything by being intelligent, and by the time you could understand the answer you're asking for you'd know it, and wouldn't need to ask.

You don't understand your father, Alice; you don't know what it takes to change him when he's made up his mind to be stubborn." Alice rose and began to get herself into a skirt.

"Well, I don't think making scenes ever changes anybody," she grumbled.

"I think a little jolly persuasion goes twice as far, myself." "'A little jolly persuasion!'" Her mother turned the echo of this phrase into an ironic lament.

"Yes, there was a time when I thought that, too! It didn't work; that's all." "Perhaps you left the 'jolly' part of it out, mama." For the second time that morning--it was now a little after seven o'clock--tears seemed about to offer their solace to Mrs.Adams.