"I hope you don't neglect your school work, though, Carl." Mrs. Cowles held the scarf nearer the lamp and squinted at it, deliberately and solemnly, through the eye-glasses that lorded it atop her severe nose. A headachy scent of moth-balls was in the dull air. She forbiddingly moved the shade of the lamp about a tenth of an inch. She removed some non-existent dust from the wrought-iron standard. Her gestures said that the lamp was decidedly more chic than the pink-shaded hanging lamps, raised and lowered on squeaking chains, which characterized most Joralemon living-rooms. She glanced at the red lambrequin over the nearest window. The moth-ball smell grew more stupifying. Carl felt stuffy in the top of his nose as he mumbled, "Oh, I work pretty hard at chemistry, but, gee! I can't see much to all this Latin." "When you're a little _older_, Carl, you'll _learn_ that the things you like now aren't necessarily the things that are _good_ for you. I used to say to Gertrude--of course she is older than you, but she hasn't been a young lady for so very long, even yet--and I used to say to her, 'Gertrude, you will do exactly what I _tell_ you to, and not what you _want_ to do, and we shall make--no--more--words--_about_ it!' And I think she _sees_ now that her mother was right about some things! Dr. Doyle said to me, and of course you know, Carl, that he's a very fine scholar--our pastor told me that the doctor reads French better than _he_ does, and the doctor's told me some things about modern French authors that I didn't know, and I used to read French almost as well as English, when I was a girl, my teachers all told me--and he says that he thinks that Gertrude has a very fine mind, and he was _so_ glad that she hasn't been taken in by all this wicked, hysterical way girls have to-day of thinking they know more than their mothers." "Yes, she is--Gertie is----I think she's got a very fine mind," Carl commented. (From the other end of the room Gertie could be overheard confiding to the dentist in tones of hushed and delicious adult scandal, "They say that when she was in St. Paul she----") "So," Mrs. Cowles serenely sniffed on, while the bridge of Carl's nose felt broader and broader, stretching wider and wider, as that stuffy feeling increased and the intensive heat stung his eyelids, "you see you mustn't think because you'd rather play around with the boys than study Latin, Carl, that it's the fault of your Latin-teacher." She nodded at him with a condescending smile that was infinitely insulting. He knew it and resented it, but he did not resent it actively, for he was busy marveling, "How the dickens is it I never heard Doc Doyle was stuck on Gertie? Everybody thought he was going with Bertha. Dang him, anyway! The way he snickers, you'd think she was his best girl."