s what draws us to the job."

She wouldn't listen to any such theory.

"Have you lost a great deal of money?" she asked severely.

"Not enough to turn us out of the old home," he smiled. "I won something
under four hundred dollars."

Her brow cleared. She liked her son to be successful, preeminent in
anything--right or wrong--which he undertook.

"You made a mistake to get mixed up with people like that," she said.
She knew where he had been dining.

"I can't be said to have got mixed up with them. The only one I
expressed any wish to see again slammed the door in my face."

The next instant he wished he had not spoken. He hoped his mother had
not noticed what he said. She remained silent, but she had understood
perfectly, and he had made for Lydia an implacable enemy. A woman who
slammed the door in the face of Dan was deserving of hell-fire, in Mrs.
O'Bannon's opinion. She did not ask who it was, because she knew that in
the course of everyday life together secrets between two people are
impossible and the name would come out.

After an almost sleepless night he woke in the morning with the zest of
living extraordinarily renewed within him. Every detail in the pattern
of life delighted him, from the smell of coffee floating up from the
kitchen on the still cold of the November morning to the sight from his
window of the village children in knit caps and sweaters hurrying to
school--tall, lanky, competent girls bustling their little brothers
along, and inattentive boys hoisting small sisters up the school steps
by their arms. Life was certainly great fun, not because there were
lovely women to be held in your arms, but because when young and
vigorous you can bully life into being what you want it to be. And yet,
good heavens, what a girl! At four that very afternoon he would see her
again.

He was in court all the morning. The courthouse, which if it had been
smaller would have looked like a mausoleum in a cemetery, and if it had
been larger would have looked like the Madeleine, was set back from the
main street. The case he was prosecuting--a case of criminal negligence
against a young driver of a delivery wagon who had run over and injured
a prominent citizen--went well; that is to say, O'Bannon obtained a
conviction. It had been one of those cases clear to the layman, for the
young man was notoriously careless; but difficult, as lawyers tell you
criminal-negligence cases are, from the legal point of view.