He had not paid very much attention to the fact that his birthday was his twenty-first, and that he was attaining his majority, though that is so important a point in the career of many young men. It was not particularly important to John. He had no joyful tenantry to celebrate it; no happy father and mother to wish him joy. He was already in some things much older than his age, experienced by long encounter with the practical, and by the habits of self-dependence which the nature of his occupations had forced upon him. He was rather, if anything, disposed to smile at the importance of twenty-one, not seeing what difference it could make. His little property he had long ceased to think of. At seventeen it had seemed important; at twenty, nothing. What could it matter? It was better, even more just, he thought, that his mother should have it, who was after all the natural heir of her parents: and if it could purchase a little ease, a little relaxation for her, John was not only generously willing, but had a less amiable, half scornful feeling, that to throw it back at her feet was the only thing that he could desire to do. He was astonished accordingly when he went by her invitation on the evening of his birthday to visit his mother, to find her table covered with papers and she herself awaiting his arrival with a number of accounts and note-books. ‘I have to render an account of my stewardship,’ she said, with her usual gravity. He did not always recognise the change in her manner of speaking to him and regarding him, but nevertheless there was a great change. ‘What stewardship?’ he said. ‘I cease to-day to be your guardian, John, and your trustee and manager and everything. My father thought it unnecessary to burden you with any of those things. He had perhaps an excessive confidence in me. I have now to give up my accounts----’ ‘I want no accounts,’ he said: ‘I want to hear nothing about it. If I am to be acknowledged a man, that’s enough. I’ve been to my own consciousness a man--and older than most people--long enough.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, with a little sigh, ‘you are a man; you have proved yourself one. The softest of mothers (and I know I have never been soft) could not acknowledge that with more gratitude and satisfaction than I.’ ‘But a little grudge,’ he said, with a laugh. He was able to laugh now, though never to forget altogether the bitterness of being misjudged. He no longer talked to her with constraint, feeling himself like a child in her presence--but even yet he was never really at his ease with her. ‘With a grudge,’ he said. ‘You would almost rather I had confirmed your bad opinion, and justified you in what you expected.’