“Oh! I see,” returned Joyce. “I ain’t in such a hurry. What’s he doing?” Doubleday, whose propensities were waggish, suggested “shaving,” but half ashamed of it, since the joke missed, fell to as if he were soaping his face, and had some trouble to contract his jaw. The delay in Evan’s attendance on the guests of the house was caused by the fact that Mrs. Mel had lain in wait for him descending, to warn him that he must treat them with no supercilious civility, and to tell him partly the reason why. On hearing the potential relations in which they stood toward the estate of his father, Evan hastily and with the assurance of a son of fortune, said they should be paid. “That’s what they would like to hear,” said Mrs. Mel. “You may just mention it when they’re going to leave. Say you will fix a day to meet them.” “Every farthing!” pursued Evan, on whom the tidings were beginning to operate. “What! debts? my poor father!” “And a thumping sum, Van. You will open your eyes wider.” “But it shall be paid, mother,—it shall be paid. Debts? I hate them. I’d slave night and day to pay them.” Mrs. Mel spoke in a more positive tense: “And so will I, Van. Now, go.” It mattered little to her what sort of effect on his demeanour her revelation produced, so long as the resolve she sought to bring him to was nailed in his mind; and she was a woman to knock and knock again, till it was firmly fixed there. With a strong purpose, and no plans, there were few who could resist what, in her circle, she willed; not even a youth who would gaily have marched to the scaffold rather than stand behind a counter. A purpose wedded to plans may easily suffer shipwreck; but an unfettered purpose that moulds circumstances as they arise, masters us, and is terrible. Character melts to it, like metal in the steady furnace. The projector of plots is but a miserable gambler and votary of chances. Of a far higher quality is the will that can subdue itself to wait, and lay no petty traps for opportunity. Poets may fable of such a will, that it makes the very heavens conform to it; or, I may add, what is almost equal thereto, one who would be a gentleman, to consent to be a tailor. The only person who ever held in his course against Mrs. Mel, was Mel,—her husband; but, with him, she was under the physical fascination of her youth, and it never left her. In her heart she barely blamed him. What he did, she took among other inevitable matters.