ace in the world, and which, if somewhat lacking
in opportunity, was ample in the leisure they believed more congenial to
him than success. Some of his lady patients at the hotels, who felt at
times that they could not live without him, would have carried him back
to the city with them by a gentle violence; but there was nothing in
anything he said or did that betrayed ambition on his part. He liked to
hear them talk, especially of their ideas of progress, as they called
them, at which, with the ready adaptability of their sex, they joined
him in laughing when they found that he could not take them seriously.
The social, the emotional expression of the new scientific civilization
struck him as droll, particularly in respect to the emancipation of
women; and he sometimes gave these ladies the impression that he did
not value woman's intellect at its true worth. He was far from light
treatment of them, he was considerate of the distances that should be
guarded; but he conveyed the sense of his scepticism as to their fitness
for some things to which the boldest of them aspired.

His mother would have been willing to have him go to the city if he
wished, but she was too ignorant of the world outside of Corbitant to
guess at his possibilities in it, and such people as she had seen from
it had not pleased her with it. Those summer-boarding lady patients who
came to see him were sometimes suffered to wait with her till he came
in, and they used to tell her how happy she must be to keep such a
son with her, and twittered their patronage of her and her nice
old-fashioned parlor, and their praises of his skill in such wise
against her echoless silence that she conceived a strong repugnance
for all their tribe, in which she naturally included Grace when she
appeared. She had decided the girl to be particularly forth-putting,
from something prompt and self-reliant in her manner that day; and she
viewed with tacit disgust her son's toleration of a handsome young woman
who had taken up a man's profession. They were not people who gossiped
together, or confided in each other, and she would have known nothing
and asked nothing from him about her, further than she had seen for
herself. But Barlow had folks, as he called them, at Corbitant; and
without her own connivance she had heard from them of all that was
passing at Jocelyn's.

It was her fashion to approach any subject upon which she wished her
son to talk as if they had already t