Book quotation - that sounds better than selection, right?

This week's passage is from the mind of Mma Ramotswe, Botswana's leading lady detective:

She had recently told a young boy to pick up an empty can that he had tossed on the ground in the mall the other day. He had looked at her in amazement, and had then told her that she could pick it up if she liked as he had no intention of doing so. When she was young, a woman would have picked up a boy like that and spanked him on the spot. But today you couldn't spank other people's children in the street; if you tried to do so there would be an enormous fuss. She was a modern lady and did not approve of spanking, but sometimes she had to wonder. Would that boy have dropped the can in the first place if he knew that somebody might spank him?

(Tears of the Giraffe, Alexander McCall Smith)