Adna was encouraged to say: “If I was you, Kedzie, I'd just lay the facts before him. Maybe he could buy the feller off. You could probably get him mighty cheap.” Mrs. Thropp habitually resented all her husband's arguments. She scorned this proposal. “Don't you do it, Kedzie. Just as you said, he'd most likely run like a rabbit.” “Then what am I going to do?” Kedzie whimpered. There was a long silence. Mrs. Thropp pondered bitterly. She was the most moral of women. She had brought up her children with all rigidity. She had abused them for the least dereliction. She had upheld the grimmest standard of virtue, with “Don't!” for its watchword. Of virtue as a warm-hearted, alert, eager, glowing spirit, cultivating the best and most beautiful things in life, she had no idea. Virtue was to her a critic, a satirist, a neighborhood gossip, something scathing and ascetic. That delicate balance between failing to mind one's own business and failing to respond to another's need did not bother her--nor did that theory of motherhood which instils courage, independence, originality, and enthusiasm for life, and starts children precociously toward beauty, love, grace, philanthropy, invention, art, glory. She had the utmost contempt for girls who went right according to their individualities, or went wrong for any reason soever. The least indiscretions of her own daughters she visited with endless tirades. Kedzie had escaped them for a long while. She had succeeded as far as she had because she had escaped from the most dangerous of all influences--a perniciously repressive mother. She would have been scolded viciously now if it had not been for Dyckman's mighty prestige. The Dyckman millions in person were about to enter this room. The Dyckman millions wanted Kedzie. If they got her it would be a wonderful thing for a poor, hard-working girl who had had the spunk to strike out for herself and make her own way without expense to her father and mother. The Dyckman millions, furthermore, would bring the millennium at once to the father and mother. Mrs. Thropp, fresh from her village (yet not so very fresh--say, rather, recent from sordid humility), sat dreaming of herself as a Dyckman by marriage. She imagined herself and the great Mrs. Dyckman in adjoining rocking-chairs, exchanging gossip and recipes and anecdotes of their joint grandchildren-to-be. Just to inhale the aroma of that future, that vision of herself as Mr. Dyckman's mother-in-law, was like breathing in deeply of laughing-gas; a skilful dentist could have extracted a molar from her without attracting her attention. And in the vapor of that stupendous temptation the devil actually did extract from her her entire moral code without her noticing the difference.