Every cent of the money which he had
inherited from his father had been expended. Nothing remained except
his mother's small property, which barely sufficed to support her.
Anderson then borrowed money from his uncle, who was well-to-do,
giving him his note for three years, rented a store on Main Street,
purchased a stock of groceries, and went into trade. His course made
quite a sensation. He was the first Anderson in the memory of
Banbridge, where the name was an old one, to be outside the genteel
pale of a profession. His father had been a physician, his
grandfather a clergyman.

"If my son had studied medicine instead of law, he could have at
least subsisted upon the proceeds of his profession," his mother
said, with the gentle and dignified dissent which was her attitude
with regard to her son's startling move. "People are simply obliged
by the laws of the flesh to go through measles and whooping-coughs
and mumps, and they have to be born and die, and when they get in the
way of microbes they have to be ill and they have to call in a
physician, and some few of them pay him, so he can manage at least to
live. Of course law is different. If people haven't any money they
can forego quarrels, unless they are forced upon them. Quarrels are
luxuries. It really began to seem to me that all the opportunity for
a lawyer in Banbridge was in the simple line of suing some one for
debt, and there is always that way, which does seem to me rather
dishonest, of putting the property out of one's hands."

There was undoubtedly much truth in what Mrs. Sylvia Anderson said.
She was a shrewd old woman, with such a softly feminine manner that
she misled people into thinking the contrary. Banbridge folk rather
pitied Randolph Anderson for having such a sweetly helpless and
incapable mother, albeit very pretty and very much of a lady.

Mrs. Anderson was a large woman, but delicately articulated, with
small hands, and such tiny feet that she toppled a little when she
walked. Her complexion was like a child's, and she fluffed her thick
white locks over her ears and swathed her throat high in soft laces,
concealing all the aged lines in face and figure with innocent
feminine arts.

Randolph adored his mother. He had never cared for any other woman.
He had sat at his mother's little feet all his life, although he had
at times his own masculine way, as in the matter of the deserting of
his profession for trade. He had remained firm, alth