s balances and test-tubes
and the like! It was impossible. Scott must take the other idea home
with him and think it over carefully, during the coming holidays.

And Scott did take the idea home with him; but, from the first, he
found it out of the question to think it over carefully. How could he,
when, within himself, he knew that his feeling for the profession laid
down before him by ancestral tradition and by his mother's constant
urgings: that his feeling for the ministry was a perfunctory affection,
a wholly different matter from the passionate desire that throbbed
within him at the thought of giving up his life to scientific study. To
preach ancient beliefs that no human power could verify, or to work on
steadily, helping to broaden the field of truth, and proving all things
as he went along: these were the alternatives. Obviously there could be
no comparison between them.

Scott took the idea home with him, as Professor Mansfield had advised
him. All those first days at home, he hugged the idea tight, tight,
caressed it, gloated over it in secret, but allowed no one, not even
Catie, to share it with him. Before he went back again to college, he
would show it to his mother, would allow her to share his ecstasy at
the new opportunity opened out before him. Not yet, however. For the
first time in all his life, Scott Brenton was seriously in love. He
gave to this new vision a fervent passion such as Catie had been
powerless to arouse; like all young lovers, he desired a little time to
revel in secret over the mere fact that he knew he was in love.

Of his mother's consent to the change of plan, Scott Brenton felt no
doubt. Little by little, with his growth towards manhood, Scott had
come to dominate his mother more than either of them realized. His very
repression, his subordination in all his other relationships, helped
towards this end. It was but a natural reaction from his servile
position when away from home that, once more at home, he should assert
himself as potential master of the house. His virile will was dormant,
crushed, but it was by no means dead. And his mother, adoring him and
idealizing him despite her maternal qualms on his account, yielded
herself readily enough to his domination. And then, all at once, her
yielding came to a sudden end against the bed rock of her character.
Her own ambition, Scott's ultimate salvation, alike forbade him to
renounce his ministerial career.

After all, though,