Paine tells how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign on the billiard-room door: "No billiards after 10 P.M."--a sign that was always outlawed. "He was a boy," Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He used to complain humorously how his daughters were always trying to keep him straight--"dusting papa off," as they called it, and how, wherever he went, little notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I have been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my life." And by virtue of this lovable weakness, too, he was the typical American male. As we can see now, it was affection rather than material self-interest that was leading Mark Twain onward and upward. It had always been affection! He had never at bottom wanted to "make good" for any other reason than to please his mother, and in order to get on he had had to adopt his mother's values of life; he had had to repress the deepest instinct in him and accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of success. As the ward of his mother, he had never consciously broken with the traditions of Western society. Now, a candidate for gentility on terms wholly foreign to his nature, he found the filial bond of old renewed with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had to "make good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far more complicated obligation. As we shall see, Mark Twain rebelled against her will, just as he had rebelled against his mother's, yet could not seriously or finally question anything she thought or did. "He adored her as little less than a saint," we are told: which is only another way of saying that, automatically, her gods had become his.