was tingling now, as he laid down his knife and
fork, rested his elbows on the table before him and clasped his hands
tight above his plate.

"I think I have all the light I am likely to get, mother," he said
steadily.

"But, if the light within thee be--"

He checked her with a sudden petulant lift of his head. And, after all,
it was not quite her fault. Life, for her, had been so hard and so busy
that he ought not to grudge her the consolation she had been able to
dig up out of the accumulated _debris_ of the ancestral trick of
sermonizing. In a more gracious, plastic existence, she would have
taken it out in Browning and the Russians; yet she was not necessarily
more narrow because her literary artists were pre-Messianic. Neither
was it the fault of those same artists that they were quoted in and out
of season, and always for the purpose of clinching an obnoxious point.

"It isn't," he said, as quietly as he was able. Then the boyishness
pent up within him came bursting out once more. "Listen, mother," he
said impetuously. "Really, this thing has got to be talked out between
us to the very dregs. We may as well face it now as ever, and come to
the final conclusion. I know you started out to make me into a
minister. I know you feel that it is the one great profession of them
all. But is it?"

For a minute, her hands gripped each other; but they were underneath
the hanging edge of tablecloth, and so invisible to Scott.

"What can be greater than to speak the truth that makes us free?" she
questioned.

"Isn't there more than one kind of truth, mother?" he challenged her.

"How can there be?"

Again he shut his teeth and swallowed down his opposition. He was too
immature to argue that there might be different facets to the selfsame
truth.

"Listen, mother," he began again, when he had proved to himself that he
could rely upon his self-control. "As I say, I started out to be a
minister, to be another Parson Wheeler in fact, if not in name. I know
it has been your dream to hear me preach, some day or other. And I know
how you have pinched and scrimped and worked, to give me the education
that I was bound to need."

"You have worked, too, Scott," she told him, in swift generosity. "You
have tugged along and gone without things and worked hard, in your
books and out of them. You know I have been proud of you; the credit
for it isn't all mine, by any means."

His young face flushed and softened. Unclasping hi