om and the
bedmaking over to Susan and dawdle about after Paw or celebrate matins
in the green aisles of the garden. But mostly the old couple just
pretended to do their chores, and sat on the porch and watched the
clouds go by and the frogs flop into the pond.

"Mail come yet, Maw?"

"Susan's gone for it."

He glanced up the road to a sunbonneted figure blurred in the glare, and
sniffed amiably. "Humph! Country's getting so citified the morning
papers are here almost before breakfast's cleared off. Remember when we
used to drive eleven mile to get the _Weekly Tribune_, Maw?"

"I remember. And it took you about a week to read it. Sometimes you got
one number behind. Nowadays you finish your paper in about five
minutes."

"Nothing much in the papers nowadays except murder trials and divorce
cases. I guess Susan must have a mash on that mail-carrier."

"I wish she'd come on home and not gabble so much."

"Expectin' a letter from the boy?"

"Ought to be one this morning."

"You've said that every mornin' for three weeks. I s'pose he's so busy
in town he don't realize how much his letters mean to us."

"I hate to have him in the city with its dangers--he's so reckless with
his motor, and then there's the temptations and the scramble for money.
I wish Stevie had been contented to settle down with us. We've got
enough, goodness knows. But I suppose he feels he must be a millionaire
or nothing, and what you've made don't seem a drop in the bucket."

The old man winced. He thought how often the boy had found occasion to
draw on him for help in financing his "sure things" and paying up the
losses on the "sure things" that had gone wrong. Those letters had been
sent to the bank in town and had not been mentioned at home, except now
and then, long afterward, when the wife pressed the old man too hard
about holding back money from the boy. Then he would unfold a few
figures. They dazed her, but they never convinced her.

Who ever convinced a woman? Persuaded? Yes, since Eve! Convinced? Not
yet!

It hurts a man's pride to hear his wife impliedly disparage his own
achievements in contrast with his son's. Not that he is jealous of his
son; not that he does not hope and expect that the boy will climb to
peaks he has never dared; not that he would not give his all and bend
his own back as a stepping-stone to his son's ascension; but just that
comparisons are odious. This disparagement is natural, though, to wives,
for t