ain.

"Oh, the business didn't amount to much," was my answer to one of my
mother's first questions, on my return. She smiled peculiarly. In spite
of my efforts, the red came--at least I felt red.

"How did you like his sister?" she went on, again with that fluttering
smile in the eyes only.

"A very nice girl," said I, in anything but a natural manner. My
mother's expression teased me into adding: "Don't be silly. Nothing of
_that_ sort. You are always imagining that every one shares your opinion
of me. She isn't likely to fall in love with me. Certainly I shan't with
her."

Mother's silence somehow seemed argumentative.

"I couldn't marry a girl for her money," I retorted to it.

"Of course not," rejoined mother. "But there are other things to marry
for besides money, or love,--other things more sensible than either. For
instance, there are the principal things,--home and children."

I was listening with an open mind.

"The glamour of courtship and honeymoon passes," she went on. "Then
comes the sober business of living,--your career and your home. The
woman's part in both is better played if there isn't the sort of love
that is exacting, always interfering with the career, and making the
home-life a succession of ups and downs, mostly downs."

"Carlotta is very ambitious," said I.

"Ambitious for her husband," replied my mother, "as a sensible woman
should be. She appreciates that a woman's best chance for big dividends
in marriage is by being the silent partner in her husband's career.
She'll be very domestic when she has children. I saw it the instant I
looked at her. She has the true maternal instinct. What a man who's
going to amount to something needs isn't a woman to be taken care of,
but a woman to take care of him."

She said no more,--she had made her point; and, when she had done that,
she always stopped.

Within a month Ed Ramsay sent for me again, but this time it was
business alone. I found him in a panic, like a man facing an avalanche
and armed only with a shovel. Dunkirk, the senior United States senator
for our state, lived at Fredonia. He had seen that, by tunneling the
Mesaba Range, a profitable railroad between Fredonia and Chicago could
be built that would shorten the time at least three hours. But it would
take away about half the carrying business of the Ramsay Company,
besides seriously depreciating the Ramsay interest in the existing
road. "And," continued Ed, "the old scoundre