started, she said
brightly, so you see he saw through them afore ever he set eyes on
them."

Corp would have replied admiringly to this "Oh, the little deevil!"
(when he heard of Tommy's failure he wanted to fight Gav Dishart and
Willie Simpson), but Aaron was another kind of confidant, and even when
she explained on Tommy's authority that there are two kinds of
cleverness, the kind you learn from books and a kind that is inside
yourself, which latter was Tommy's kind, he only replied,

"He can take it wi' him to the herding, then, and see if it'll keep the
cattle frae stravaiging."

"It's no that kind of cleverness either," said Elspeth, quaking, and
quaked also Tommy, who had gone to the garret, to listen through the
floor.

"No? I would like to ken what use his cleverness can be put to, then,"
said Aaron, and Elspeth answered nothing, and Tommy only sighed, for
that indeed was the problem. But though to these three and to Cathro,
and to Mr. and Mrs. McLean and to others more mildly interested, it
seemed a problem beyond solution, there was one in Thrums who rocked her
arms at their denseness, a girl growing so long in the legs that twice
within the last year she had found it necessary to let down her
parramatty frock. As soon as she heard that Tommy had come home
vanquished, she put on the quaint blue bonnet with the white strings,
in which she fondly believed she looked ever so old (her period of
mourning was at an end, but she still wore her black dress) and
forgetting all except that he was unhappy, she ran to a certain little
house to comfort him. But she did not go in, for through the window she
saw Elspeth petting him, and that somehow annoyed her. In the evening,
however, she called on Mr. Cathro.

Perhaps you want to know why she, who at last saw Sentimental Tommy in
his true light and spurned him accordingly, now exerted herself in his
behalf instead of going on with the papering of the surgery. Well, that
was the reason. She had put the question to herself before--not, indeed,
before going to Monypenny but before calling on the Dominie--and decided
that she wanted to send Tommy to college, because she disliked him so
much that she could not endure the prospect of his remaining in Thrums.
Now, are you satisfied?

She could scarcely take time to say good-evening to Mr. Cathro before
telling him the object of her visit. "The letters Tommy has been writing
for people are very clever, are they not?" she