This achievement was a facer for the designing Gertrude, also for the antiquated Doctor Tremlett. On the other hand, it was a triumph for Ethel and for the modern school of medicine. Horace, Doctor Cockburn, was reinstated. Maria would still have felt safer with some one who really understood the heart and its ways, but, as Ethel pointed out to her, she would earn the admiration of everybody if she could manage to postpone her really serious illness until the following year. Maria, at any rate, was open to reason. For the sake of the general life of the community she would do her best. But it was very hard upon her; far harder than people realized. As she had once pathetically told Josiah, "she hadn't been brought up to that kind of thing," to which the Mayor promptly rejoined, "that he hadn't either, but he was as good as some who had." Education was what the Mayor called a flam. In the main it wasn't prattical. He allowed that it was useful in certain ways and in carefully regulated doses, but of late years it had been ridiculously overdone and was in a fair way to ruin the country. Education didn't agree with everybody. He knew a case in point. A classical instance of schooling misapplied would always remain in his mind. There were times when he brooded over this particular matter in secret, for he never spoke of it openly. His youngest girl, upon whose upbringing a fabulous sum had been lavished, had cast such a blot on the family escutcheon that it was almost impossible to forgive her. It was all very well for Ethel to talk of Sally's doings in Serbia. That seemed the best place for people like her. Yet, as a matter of strict equity, and Josiah was a just man, although a harsh one, he supposed that presently he would have to do something in the matter. Under the surface he was a good deal troubled by Sally. She was out of his will and he had fully made up his mind to have nothing more to do with her; she had had carte blanche in the matter of learning, and the only use she had made of it was to disgrace him in the eyes of the world. All that, however, was before the war. And there was no doubt that the war had altered things. Before the war he lived for money and worldly reputation; but now that he was in the thick of the fight some of his ideas had changed. Money, for instance, seemed to matter far less than formerly; and he had come to see that the only kind of worldly reputation worth having didn't depend upon externals. His success as a public man had taught him that. It wasn't his fine house on The Rise, or the fact that he had become one of the richest men in the city, that had caused him to be unanimously invited to carry on for another year. Other qualities had commended him. He didn't pretend to be what he was not, and the people of the soundest judgment seemed to like him all the better on that account.