d, never (to do her justice) pushed Albert on her second husband.
So, when the juncture arrived,--

"Why, yes," Johnny had said, "have him here, of course; and let him stay
as long as you like. He doesn't bother _me_."

Well, Albert went ahead, doing his Latin, and groping farther into the
dusky penumbra of mathematics. "Why?" he asked; and they explained that
it was the necessary preparation for the university. Albert pondered. He
began to fear that he must continue learning things he didn't want or
need, so that he might go ahead toward learning other things he didn't
want or need. He took a plaintive, discouraged tone in a letter to his
mother; and she--making an exception to her rule--passed along the
protest to McComas. She felt, I suppose, that he would give an answering
note.

Johnny laughed. He himself cared nothing for study; and he was so
happily constituted, as well as so constantly occupied, that he never
had to take refuge in a book.

"Oh, well," he said, broadly, "he'll live through it all, and live it
down. I expect Tom and Joe to. The final gains will be in quite another
direction."

Raymond had heard the same plaint from Albert, and was less pleased. The
boy was clearly to be no student, still less a lover of the arts.
Raymond passed over all thought of old Jehiel, the ruthlessly
acquisitive, and placed the blame on the other grandfather, who was now
in an early dotage after a lifelong harnessing to the stock-ticker.

"_I_ don't know how he's coming out!" was Raymond's impatient remark,
over one of Albert's letters. "Who knows what _any_ boy is going to be?"

Albert accepted his school readily enough as a place of residence. He
did not now need, so much as before, his mother's small cares--in fact,
was glad to be relieved from them; nor was he quite advanced enough to
profit from a cautious father's hints and suggestions. I found myself
hoping that Raymond, at the coming stage of Albert's development, might
have as little trouble as I had had over my own boy (with whose early
career I shall not burden you). Yet, after all, fathers may
apprehensively exchange views and cautiously devise methods of approach
only to find their efforts superfluous: so many boys come through
perfectly well, after all. Simply consider, for example, those in our
old singing-class. The only one to occasion any inconvenience was Johnny
McComas, and he was not a member at all.

The one side of the matter that began to co