It is hard enough for any mother to receive the news that her son is in love with any woman and wants to marry her. Mrs. Dyckman must learn that her adored child had transferred his loyalty to a foreigner, a girl she had never seen, could not conceivably have selected, and could never approve. Even the Prodigal Son, when he went home, did not bring a wife with him. Ten to one if he had brought one she would have got no veal--or if she got it she would not have cared for it. Jim could not be blind even now in his alarm to Kedzie's intense prettiness, but seeing her as through his mother's eyes coldly, he saw for the first time the plebeiance of her grace. If she had been strong and rugged her commonness would have had a certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and miss it by a comma. Yet Jim understood that he could not long prevent the encounter of his wife and her relatives with his mother and her relatives. He could not be so boorishly insolent as to forbid the meeting, and he could not be so blind as to expect success. He got away at length on the pretext of making arrangements with his mother, who was a very busy woman, he said. Mrs. Thropp could not imagine why a rich woman should be busy, but she held her whist. Jim was glad to escape, even on so gruesome an errand, and now when he kissed Kedzie good-by he had to kiss momma as well. He would almost rather have kissed poppa. He entered his home in the late afternoon with the reluctance of boyhood days when he had slunk back after some misdemeanor. He loathed his mission and himself and felt that he had earned a trouncing and a disinheritance. He found his mother and father in the library playing, or rather fighting, a game of double Canfield. In the excitement of the finish they were like frantic children, tied in knots of hurry, squealing with emulation. The cards were coming out right, and the speedier of the two to play the last would score two hundred and fifty to the other's nothing. Mrs. Dyckman was the more agile in snatching up her cards and placing them. Her eyes darted along the stacks with certainty, and she came in first by a lead of three cards. Dyckman was puffing with exhaustion and pop-eyed from the effort to look in seven directions at once. It rendered him scarlet to be outrun by his wife, who was no Atalanta to look at. Besides, she always crowed over him insufferably when she won, and that was worse than the winning. When Jim entered the room she was laughing uproariously, pointing the finger of derision at her husband and crying: