It never occurred to my mother, until it came to the concrete question of spending-money, that there was anything more than a kind of natural perverseness in my attitude, which only served to throw into relief the satisfactoriness of her relations to her son. Forester, it appeared, was to have an allowance, and I wanted one too. "But what," said my mother, tolerantly, for she had not yet thought of granting it, "would you do with an allowance?" "Whatever Forester does." "But Forester," my mother explained, waving the stocking she had stretched upon her hand, "is a boy." I expostulated. "What has that got to do with it?" "Olivia!" The ridiculousness of having such a question addressed to her brought a smile to my mother's lips, which hung fixed there as I saw her mind back away suddenly in fear that I was really going to insist on knowing what that had to do with it. "I give you twenty-five cents a week for church money," she parried weakly. "That's what you think I ought to give. I want an allowance, and then I can deny myself and give what I like." "Forester earns his," said my mother; she hadn't of course meant the discussion to get on to a basis of reasonableness. "Well," I threatened, "I'll earn mine." That was really what did the business in the end. All the boys in Taylorville worked as soon as they were old enough, but it was the last resort of poverty that girls should be put to wages. Before that possibility my mother retreated into amused indulgence. She paid me my allowance, appreciably less than my brother's, on the first of the month, with the air of concurring in a joke, which I think now must have covered some vague hurt at my want of sympathy with the beautiful fiction of Forester's growing up to take my father's place with her. They had achieved by the time Forester was twenty, what passed for perfect confidence between them, though it was at the cost of Forester's living shallowly or not at all in the courts of boyhood which my mother was unable to reënter, and her voluntary withdrawal from varieties of experience from which his youth prevented him. My mother always thought it was made up to her in affection; what came out of it for Forester is still on the knees of the gods.