“It’s what I always knew I had got to come to, first or last. And I suppose I ought to feel glad enough I didn’t have to come to it at first.” “No!” said her son. “I’m not a stripling any longer.” He laughed, keeping his mother’s hand. She freed it and taking up the table-cloth folded it lengthwise and then across, and laid it neatly away in the cupboard. “I sha’n’t interfere with you, nor any woman that you bring here to be your wife. I’ve had my day, and I’m not one of the old fools that think they’re going to have and to hold forever. You’ve always been a good boy to me, and I guess you hain’t ever had to complain’ of your mother stan’in’ in your way. I sha’n’t now. But I _did_ think—” She stopped and shut her lips firmly. “Speak up, mother!” he cried. “I guess I better not,” she answered, setting her chair back against the wall. “I know what you mean. You mean about my laughing at women that try to take men’s places in the world. Well, I did laugh at them. They’re ridiculous. I don’t want to marry this girl because she’s a doctor. That was the principal drawback, in my mind. But it doesn’t make any difference, and wouldn’t now, if she was a dozen doctors.” His mother let down the leaves of the table, and pushed it against the wall, and he rose from the chair in which he was left sitting in the middle of the room. “I presume,” she said, with her back toward him, as she straightened the table accurately against the mopboard, “that you can let me have the little house at Grant’s Corner.” “Why, mother!” he cried. “You don’t suppose I should ever let you be turned out of house and home? You can stay here as long as you live. But it hasn’t come to that, yet. I don’t know that she cares anything about me. But there are chances, and there are signs. The chances are that she won’t have the courage to take up her plan of life again, and that she’ll consider any other that’s pressed home upon her. And I take it for a good sign that she’s sent that fellow adrift. If her mind hadn’t been set on some one else, she’d have taken him, in this broken-up state of hers. Besides, she has formed the habit of doing what I say, and there’s a great deal in mere continuity of habit. It will be easier for her to say yes than to say no; it would be very hard for her to say no.” While he eagerly pressed these arguments his mother listened stonily, without apparent interest or sympathy. But at the end she asked, “How are you going to support a wife? Your practice here won’t do it. Has _she_ got anything?” “She has property, I believe,” replied her son. “She seems to have been brought up in that way.” “She won’t want to come and live here, then. She’ll have notions of her own. If she’s like the rest of them, she’ll never have you.”