The fact was, she was contrasting in her own mind the man who had to be "amused" to keep him at his work, with David--"working himself to death!" she told Nannie, proudly. And Nannie, quick to feel the slur in her words, said: "Yes, but it is quite different with Blair. Blair doesn't _have_ to do anything, you know." Still, thanks to Mrs. Richie, he was at least going to pretend to do something. And so, at a ridiculously high salary, he entered, as he told Elizabeth humorously, "upon his career." The only thing he did to make life more tolerable for himself was to live in the hotel instead of in his mother's house. But it was characteristic of him that he left the wonderful old canvas--the "fourteen by eighteen inch" picture, hanging on the wall in Nannie's parlor. "You ought to have something fit for a civilized eye to rest upon," he told her, "and I can see it when I come to see you." If his permanent departure for the River House wounded his mother, she made no protest; she only lifted a pleased eyebrow when he dropped in to supper, which, she noticed, he was apt to do whenever Elizabeth happened to take tea with Nannie. When he did come, Sarah Maitland used to look about the dining-room table, with its thick earthenware dishes--the last of the old Canton service had found its way to the ash-barrel; she used to glance at the three young people with warm satisfaction. "Like old times!" she would say kindly; "only needs David to make it complete." Mrs. Maitland was sixty-two that spring, but there was no stoop of the big shoulders, no sign of that settling and shrinking that age brings. She was at the full tide of her vigor, and her happiness in having her son beside her in the passion of her life, which was second only to her passion for him, showed itself in clumsy efforts to flaunt her contentment before her world. Every morning, with varying unpunctuality, Blair came into her office at the Works where she had had a desk placed for him. He was present, because she insisted that he should be, at the regular conferences which she held with the heads of departments. She made a pretense of asking his advice, which was as amusing to Mr. Ferguson and the under-superintendents as it was tiresome to Blair. For after his first exhilaration in responding to Mrs. Richie's high belief in him, the mere doing of duty began gradually to pall. Her belief helped him through the first four or five months, then the whole thing became a bore. His work was ludicrously perfunctory, and his listlessness when in the office was apparent to everybody. At the bottom of her heart, Sarah Maitland must have known that it was all a farce. Blair was worth nothing to the business; his only relation to it was the weekly drawing of an unearned "salary." Perhaps if Mrs. Richie had been in Mercer, to make again and again the appeal of confident expectation, that little feeble sense of duty which had started him upon his "career," might have struck a root down