And yet, notwithstanding these lofty aims and matured plans, Lynn Gordon was very young, hardly more than a boy, after all, in many things, so that he soon began to talk with boyish openness of the herculean task which he thus had set himself in sober earnest. His grandmother listened with such intense interest, such thorough understanding, and such complete sympathy as surprised herself far more than it surprised her grandson. She was taken wholly unawares,--not dreaming of finding him anything like this,--having looked forward to his coming with but lukewarm enthusiasm. The old who have been disappointed in almost everything that they have ever set their hearts upon, cease, after a while, to expect anything, and learn to shield themselves against further disappointment by real or assumed indifference. Old lady Gordon in her fierce pride had never owned, even to herself, how deep and bitter and lasting had been her disappointment in her own son. It counted for nothing with her that he had been what many would have considered a good man, though not an intellectual man in the estimation of any one. To his mother his goodness had seemed but the negative virtue of an undecided character and a mediocre mind. For the best love of a nature like hers cannot be born of mere toleration, even in a mother's heart. This mother--being what she was--might perhaps have come nearer to forgiving the things which were lacking, had this only child been a daughter. A woman like old lady Gordon never expects much of another woman, even though she be her own daughter. But she always expects everything of every man, especially when he belongs to her own family, and thus it was that old lady Gordon never could wholly forgive her only son. Least of all could she ever quite forgive him for being his father over again; an almost unpardonable offence which other poorly gifted children have committed in the eyes of other embittered mothers, who have illogically expected, as poor old lady Gordon had expected, to gather figs from thistles. When she had first faced the truth in the prime of life, her fierce pride had raised the iron shield of pretended indifference, and she had upheld it so long that it had gradually grown into the rusty armor of age's insensibility. And yet, through all its steely coldness, the young man's warm words now struck fire. A deep glow came into the impassive, handsome old face, and a warm light into the hard, fine old eyes, as she looked at this spirited, strong, determined, capable young fellow, with his brilliant face aglow, and his intelligent eyes alight. She suddenly felt him to be much more her own spirit and flesh and blood than his father had ever been. It seemed for an instant as if her own strenuous youth, with its impassioned visions of conquest--so long forgotten--came rushing back through the eloquent lips of her grandson. IX A ROMANTIC REGION