I'd better do?"

For a moment, she worked fussily at the twisted wire leg of the tile
that held the coffee pot. Her eyes were still upon the wire, when at
last she answered.

"You must do as you think right, my son."

"But what do you really think, yourself?" he urged her.

This time, she lifted her eyes until they rested full upon his own.

"It isn't exactly what we have planned it all for, Scott. Still, it may
be that this will be the next best thing, after all."

"Then you would be disappointed, if I took the chance?"

She felt the edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his
half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for
fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so should hurt
him.

"Do you need to decide just now?" she asked evasively.

"Between now and next summer."

"Why not wait till then?"

He crossed her question with another.

"What's the use of waiting?"

"You may get more light on it, if you wait," she said gravely.

Scott shut his teeth hard upon an end of sausage. It seemed to him that
it was only one more phase of the same futile whole, when his teeth
encountered a hard bit of bone. And his mother sat there, outwardly
impartial, inwardly disapproving, and talked about more light, when
already his young eyes were blinded by the lustrous dazzle. Oh, well!
It was all in the day's work, all in the difference between nineteen
and thirty-nine, he told himself as patiently as he was able. And his
mother at thirty-nine, he realized with disconcerting clearness, was
infinitely older than Professor Mansfield's wife at sixty. Indeed, he
sometimes wondered if she ever had been really young, ever really young
enough to forget her heritage of piety in healthy, worldly zeal.
Whatever the depths of one's filial devotion, it sometimes jars a
little to have one's mother use, by choice, the phraseology of the
minor prophets. In fact, in certain of his more unregenerate moments,
Scott Brenton had allowed himself to marvel that he had not been
christened Malachi. At least, it would have been in keeping with the
habitual tone of the domestic table talk. And yet, in other moments, he
realized acutely that that same heritage was in his nature, too. The
village gossips had been exceedingly benevolent, in that they had
spared him any inkling of the sources whence had come certain other
strains which set his blood to tingling every now and then.

Just such a strain