inexperienced,"--that put in with a
teasing smile for me,--"I used to say to myself, 'Well, anyhow, they
can't _kill_ me.' And the thought used to cheer me up wonderfully. In
fact, it still does."

I no longer felt hopeless. I began to gnaw my troubles again--despair is
still.

"Judge Granby is a dog," said I; "yes, a dog."

"Why 'dog'?" objected my mother. "Why not simply 'mean man'? I've never
known a dog that could equal a man who set out to be 'ornery.'"

"When I think of all the work I've done for him in these three years--"

"For yourself," she interrupted. "Work you do for others doesn't amount
to much unless it's been first and best for yourself."

"But he was benefited by it, too," I urged, "and has taken life easy,
and has had more clients and bigger fees than he ever had before. I'd
like to give him a jolt. I'd stop nagging him to put my name in a
miserable corner of the glass in his door. I'd hang out a big sign of my
own over my own office door."

My mother burst into a radiant smile. "I've been waiting a year to hear
that," she said.

Thereupon I had a shock of fright--inside, for I'd never have dared to
show fear before my mother. There's nothing else that makes you so brave
as living with some one before whom you haven't the courage to let your
cowardice show its feather. If we didn't keep each other up to the mark,
what a spectacle of fright and flight this world-drama would be!
Vanity, the greatest of vices, is also the greatest of virtues, or the
source of the greatest virtues--which comes to the same thing.

"When will you do it?" she went on, and then I knew I was in for it, and
how well-founded was the suspicion that had been keeping my lips
tight-shut upon my dream of independence.

"I'll--I'll think about it," was my answer, in a tone which I hoped she
would see was not hesitating, but reflective; "I mustn't go too far,--or
too fast."

"Better go too far and too fast than not go at all," retorted my wise
mother. "Once a tortoise beat a hare,--_once_. It never happened again,
yet the whole timid world has been talking about it ever since." And she
fell into a study from which she roused herself to say, "You'd better
let _me_ bargain for the office and the furniture,--and the big sign."
She knew--but could not or would not teach me--how to get a dollar's
worth for a dollar; would not, I suspect, for she despised parsimony,
declaring it to be another virtue which is becoming only in a