But, alas, the habits of age are always fixed, and its enthusiasms are mostly fleeting. At breakfast, on the next morning, old lady Gordon was as stolidly absorbed in the food which she was eating as she usually was in her meals. Her cynicism, her indifference, too, had all come back. Both came promptly into play, when Lynn chanced to remember his promise to play cards with the sick man, and mentioned it, which he had forgotten to do on the day before, in the intenser interest of the talk about his own future. The old lady smiled sardonically and chewed on deliberately, while the young man gave an account of what had taken place at the doctor's house. "Anne won't allow it," she finally said. "If anything could have changed her or have taken the nonsense out of her, it would have been seeing Tom go to destruction, mainly because she went to meeting. A woman like Anne takes to religion just as immoderately as a man like Tom takes to gambling." Lynn did not speak at once. He was feeling the uneasiness which comes over right-minded youth at any sign of irreligion in the old. "I thought every man liked his wife to go to church, however seldom he might go himself," he finally advanced hesitatingly. "And so he does, when he doesn't happen to want her to stay at home," said old lady Gordon, with a cynical laugh. "But I've never known a husband pious enough to like his wife's religion to interfere with his own comfort or wishes. And Tom really needed Anne a good deal more than her church did. There are men who are as sure to go wrong if their wives leave them alone, as ships are to drift without their rudders--and Tom Watson was one of these. He had little or no intellectual resources,--none at all, probably, within himself,--and he was consequently entirely dependent upon companionship. That sort of male animal always is, and if he can't get good company he takes bad, simply because he has to have company of some kind. Every sensible woman understands that sort of man, especially if she is married to him; and she knows, too, just what she's got to do, unless she's willing to take the certain consequences of not doing it. Any other woman than Anne would have thought she was lucky when Tom didn't take to anything worse than cards."