"Certainly he does. That's always the way," she in turn responded, smilingly. "The worse mated the married seem to be--to outsiders, the better they appear to suit one another. Talk about 'careful, judicious selection!'" Old lady Gordon made an inarticulate but eloquent sound of scornful incredulity. "If you were to rush out there in the big road this minute--with your eyes shut--and seize the first passer-by, you would have just as much chance of knowing what you were doing--what you were getting--as you ever will have!" Lynn wondered again what sort of a man his grandfather could have been. And his young mother, whom he had never known? Had this cynical old woman disapproved of her, had she been unkind to her? There is always something repellent to wholesome youth in the cynicism of the old. Feeling this, Lynn said rather coldly that he had thought little of such matters, he had been too much absorbed in other things, in laying life plans which must be quite apart from all thoughts of love and marriage for a good many years. The mere mention of these cherished plans brought a flush to his dark cheeks, and caused him to sit more proudly erect. They were seldom far absent from his mind, and the main thought lying nearest the heart is never long unspoken by frank young lips. It was less than a year since he had been graduated from the Harvard Law School, but his deep-laid plans lay far back of his graduation. He could hardly remember when he had not seen the path of his ambition straight and distinct before him. It was a steep one, to be sure, and hard and long, as the road to the heights must ever be. But he had faced all this wholly undaunted, knowing the power within himself, and the additional strength which fortune had given him. Yet he was a modest young fellow, and simple-hearted as well as single-minded. There was in him little vanity in his personal gifts, little pride in his inherited possessions. He simply recognized these as lucky accidents, for which he could claim no credit; holding them merely as the means whereby he might hope, more confidently than most young men, to reach the utmost limit of his ambition. The right to practise law was already his, and the rest of the way upward must open as he pressed earnestly and untiringly onward,--the bar, the bench, the supreme bench, those must be within the winning of any man having fair ability, unbounded capacity for hard work, and abundant means to wait for its fruition; and he knew himself to be possessed of all these. This seemed to him the highest ambition possible to an American, as perhaps it was, in those days when the ermine was still held unspotted, high above the mire of politics.