"It will not be necessary for you even to get a new piano, mother. I can use Miss Thomasina's and the assembly room piano. I am going to spend my Commencement money for a clavier. It will not make any noise that can be heard when the door of my room is shut. I need not practice at home at all. I will not be a nuisance in the least." Mrs. Lister looked at him as though he had struck her. "It is not money," she said slowly. "And it is not noise. But what you wish to do is impossible." She rose and went into the house. Richard turned to his father. "I am sorry for mother," said he. "But I am going to study music." Here at last was steel under the satin. CHAPTER XII GROWING PAINS Eleanor did not yield without a struggle to the tyranny of this new affection. The seclusion in which she and her mother lived, a natural shyness as deep, though not as manifest, as that which her mother had so strangely developed, and the keen ambition implanted and nourished by Dr. Green had prevented thus far the characteristic seeking of youth for emotion to match its own. Nor had she been humiliated by the failure of a lover to seek her. Waltonville had seemed to offer no one who was not too old or too young or too dull or already married. She admired her teachers, Dr. Lister and Dr. Scott, and would have selected Dr. Scott as a specimen of her favorite masculine type. Now she found herself changed. She could not rise in the morning and fill her leisurely summer day as she had planned. The long mornings and longer afternoons and quiet evenings were not hers to divide and use. Instead of steady practicing at exercises and scales, she practiced the bass or treble of duets; instead of sitting at her desk for many quiet productive hours, she sat on the porch or in the little parlor. Plots which she had expected to crystallize promptly now that school was over, refused to progress beyond the point where she had left them in her notebooks; images grew dim, words refused to fit themselves to thought, thought itself was dull and valueless. She could put her mind upon one object, Richard Lister; could wish for but one thing, his company. In the mornings she was least possessed. Then she had still the hope of his coming; the childish belief that if she practiced a certain number of hours or wrote a certain number of pages, the fates would reward her. If afternoon did not bring him, she tried vainly to work, as though she would by her very striving win a blessing. The evenings, if he did not appear, were intolerable. At bedtime she made up her mind definitely to think of him no more, to make to-morrow a day of accomplishment. She saw herself in a dim future greeting him placidly from some tall peak of literary achievement, but she knew while she planned that literary achievement, hitherto so intensely desired, allured no more. In anger at herself she wept. "I am a fool! I will do differently! I will not think of him!"