n's reading ancestors had led her to the naming her child Walter
Scott. Her sense of decorum caused her to wonder vaguely, after her
husband died, whether it would not be proper to change the baby's name
to Birge. Her wonderings, though, merely served to render her uneasy;
they bore no fruit in action. The associations with the name were not
of the sort she cared to emphasize, and the boy was allowed to keep his
more impressive label.

As time went on, though, he rebelled against the childish Wally and
insisted on the Scott, but prefixed by the blank initial whose
significance, he fondly hoped, would permanently remain a mystery. A
month, however, after he had entered college, he was known as Ivanhoe
to all the class who knew anything about him at all; and, in the
catalogue published in his sophomore year, he was registered quite
curtly as Scott Brenton. Never again in all his lifetime did the
incriminating _W_ reappear.

If his mother felt regretful for the change, she was far too wise to
show it. Indeed, it is quite likely that she felt no regrets at all. By
the time that Scott came to his 'teens, Mrs. Brenton was doing her
level and conscientious best to conceal from him the demoralizing fact
of her belief that he could do almost no wrong, and she clung to the
modifying _almost_ with a passionate fervour born of her clerical
ancestry and her consequent belief in the inherent viciousness of
unconverted man. Moreover, her inherited notions of conversion included
spiritual writhings and physical night-sweats and penitential tears by
way of its accomplishment. According to the creed of all the Parson
Wheelers since the Puritan migration, one became a Christian rather
violently, and not by leisurely unfolding. It had been to her the
greatest of all reliefs since the unconfessed one born of her husband's
premature removal, when the young Walter Scott had got himself
converted by means of an itinerant revivalist. From that time on, her
gaze had been fixed unfalteringly upon the hour when he should assume
the mantle of his clerical grandparents; and she inclined to look upon
his other talents as being so many manifestations of diabolic
ingenuity.

And now, these Christmas holidays, the diabolism seemed to her to be
rampant; it effervesced through all Scott's being like the mysterious
things he brewed within his test-tubes. Not that Mrs. Brenton would
have known a test-tube by sight, however. She only had gleaned from her