"I must say I'm far from altogether liking him," Susan said to her friend, a very real note of disapproval in her voice, one day toward the end of the week. Mrs. Lathrop was rocking in her new old-gold-plush stationary rocker and listened as usual with interest. "He's on the woodpile now, drawing a three-quarter profile of the woodshed. The way he perches anywhere and then goes to work and draws anything would surely make an English snail pull his castle right into his house along with him, for I've got a feeling as there's nothing about me as he hasn't got in his book by this time, and there's many things he's drawn as I never would choose to have the world in general looking over. I'm sure I don't want no view of my woodshed going down to posterity for one thing. I've had to have a woodshed, but I've never admired it, and the way I've nailed anything handy over holes in it is far from my usual way of mending. You've always mended 'hit or miss,' Mrs. Lathrop, and after years of such doings as was more worthy a poorhouse than a Christian, heaven has seen fit to reward your patching with a son fresh from the Klondike, but I've always darned blue with blue and brown with brown, and the only spot in my whole life that I haven't carefully and neatly matched the stripes in is my woodshed, and now to-day when I was thinking very seriously of using it up for the kitchen-stove next winter, if there isn't a young man from New York out drawing it in black and white, and ten to one he'll print it in some unexpected Sunday paper marked 'Jathrop Lathrop's mother's friend Susan Clegg's woodshed!' That'll be a pretty kettle of fish, and you needn't tell me that there won't be somebody to perk up and say, 'No smoke without some fire,' which will be as good as throwing it in my teeth that I'm one of those as use a safety pin when a button's off, when it's a thing as I've never done and never would do even if there is a proverb that a pin's a pin for all that." Susan paused here and looked upon her friend in serious question. Mrs. Lathrop, however, merely continued to rock pleasantly. A change had come over the spirit of her rocking since the return of Jathrop. She had rocked for years with a more or less apologetic air, as if she knew that there were those who might criticize her action and yet she couldn't personally feel that she really ought to give it up. But now she rocked with a wide, free swing as if life was life and if she liked to rock, she was going to rock, and if there were those who objected, they could object--she didn't care. There is nothing that so quickly develops an independent standpoint as the possession of money; there is nothing that so fully produces a conviction that one is thoroughly justified in doing just exactly what one pleases; there is nothing that leads to quite the same lofty indifference as to whether what pleases one pleases or displeases all the rest of the world.