"Oh, he's great too--dear Father--but so different! He and Mother between them have just about all the varieties of human nature that are worth while! Father's red-headed (though it's mostly gray now), and quick, and blustering, and awfully clever, and just adored by his students, and talks every minute, and apparently does all the deciding, and yet ... he couldn't draw the breath of life without Mother; and when it comes right down to _doing_ anything, what he always does is what he knows will come up to her standard." Morrison raised delightedly amused hands to heaven. "The Recording Angel domiciled in the house!" he cried. "It had never occurred to me before how appallingly discerning the eye of the modern offspring must be. Go on, go on!" Elated by the sensation of appearing clever, Sylvia continued with a fresh flow of eloquence. "And there never was such a highly moral bringing-up as we children have had. It's no fault of my family's if I've turned out a grasping materialist! I was brought up"--she flamed out suddenly as at some long-hoarded grievance--"I was brought up in a moral hot-house, and I haven't yet recovered from the shock of being transplanted into real earth in the real world." Morrison paid instant tribute to her aroused and serious feeling by a grave look of attention. "Won't you explain?" he asked. "I'm so dull I don't follow you. But I haven't been so interested in years." "Why, I mean," said Sylvia, trying hard to reduce to articulateness a complicated conception, "I mean that Father and Mother just deliberately represented values to me as different from what they really are, with real folks! And now I find that _I'm_ real folks! I can't help it. You are as you _are_, you know. They kept representing to me always that the _best_ pleasures are the ones that are the most important to folks--music, I mean, and Milton's poetry, and a fine novel--and, in Mother's case, a fine sunset, or a perfect rose, or things growing in the garden." No old associate of Morrison's would have recognized the man's face, shocked as it was by surprise and interest out of his usual habit of conscious, acute, self-possessed observation. The angler had inadvertently stepped off a ledge into deep water, and a very swift current was tugging at him. He leaned forward, his eyes as eager with curiosity as a boy's. "Do I understand you to say that you repudiate those 'best pleasures'?"