And through divers thrusts, Quincy learned what she meant by this. To be like a man was to be moved by ugly things--like business and money and machinery. To be like a man was to be edified by things not only ugly but wrong,--like pain, and that murder of self called sacrifice. To be like a man was to agree, in everything, with a battered, complaining woman whose drowned violet eyes had always been a mother’s. He looked at her. He tried to understand and to consent. But it was revolting work. “Think of the privilege your father has given you,” she said, “in letting you grow up in New York.” “Mama--New York is ugly!” “It is the center of the greatest country of the world,” Sarah replied. “Isn’t that of importance?” Quincy was moved by her eloquence. Perhaps, that was of importance. Yet something in him mutely stirred negation. He was impressed. But he could not agree. And this conflict fevered him. “An ugly metropolis is less important than a wild-flower!” he cried, stung to inspiration by his failure to express himself calmly. Sarah smiled. She had lived among wild-flowers; she knew. She had drudged among them; sweated among them; wanted among them. She was angered by such dangerous illusions in a son of hers. “My dear--you are talking nonsense. You’d do far better to grasp your opportunities, than to go wool-gathering--like a poet.” “I am not a poet,” Quincy defended himself. “That’s precisely it, my dear.” Sarah rose on her pillows and leaned toward him, taking his hand. Her skin was very grey and rough beside the whiteness of her night-gown and the smoothness of her bed-clothes. Brown streaks robbed the grey in her hair of dignity. It was drawn close over her scalp and a single, poorly braid was caught up and fastened at the back. Her arms were bone and her throat was a rugose mass of folds that lacked even the pomp of fat. Sarah was an old wreck for her fifty years. And Quincy looked at her. He was no physiognomist. But it pierced him that his mother was an ill argument for her own ways of living. “That’s just it, my dear,” Sarah repeated. “You’re not a poet. You’re an ordinary person like the rest of us. We’ve got to get our beauty--not in wild flowers, but in all this--” she waved her tortured hand about the room and let it fall on the rich linen. “If your skin were more white and smooth, little mother,” Quincy thought silently, “I wouldn’t care if the bed-clothes were of coarse cotton.” His mother was still speaking. “You must work hard, dear. You must prepare yourself to get along in the world. You know--you mustn’t expect too much from your father. He will give you an education. But remember, there are five of you. And, of course, Marsden and the girls will deserve most of what little there is. Only by working now, my dear, can you earn the comfort and time to do your day dreaming later.” “And when my skin is yellow, I also will have white linen,” the boy thought to himself.