better. However, he
had only a slight recurrence of the resentment which had assailed him
during the winter at every sign of his mother's interest in Morgan;
though he was still ashamed of his aunt sometimes, when it seemed to him
that Fanny was almost publicly throwing herself at the widower's head.
Fanny and he had one or two arguments in which her fierceness again
astonished and amused him.

"You drop your criticisms of your relatives," she bade him, hotly, one
day, "and begin thinking a little about your own behaviour! You say
people will 'talk' about my--about my merely being pleasant to an old
friend! What do I care how they talk? I guess if people are talking
about anybody in this family they're talking about the impertinent
little snippet that hasn't any respect for anything, and doesn't even
know enough to attend to his own affairs!"

"Snippet,' Aunt Fanny!" George laughed. "How elegant! And 'little
snippet'--when I'm over five-feet-eleven?"

"I said it!" she snapped, departing. "I don't see how Lucy can stand
you!"

"You'd make an amiable stepmother-in-law!" he called after her. "I'll be
careful about proposing to Lucy!"

These were but roughish spots in a summer that glided by evenly and
quickly enough, for the most part, and, at the end, seemed to fly. On
the last night before George went back to be a Junior, his mother asked
him confidently if it had not been a happy summer.

He hadn't thought about it, he answered. "Oh,' I suppose so. Why?"

"I just thought it would be: nice to hear you say so," she said,
smiling. "I mean, it's pleasant for people of my age to know that people
of your age realize that they're happy."

"People of your age!" he repeated. "You know you don't look precisely
like an old woman, mother. Not precisely!"

"No," she said. "And I suppose I feel about as young as you do, inside,
but it won't be many years before I must begin to look old. It does
come!" She sighed, still smiling. "It's seemed to me that, it must have
been a happy summer for you--a real 'summer of roses and wine'--without
the wine, perhaps. 'Gather ye roses while ye may'--or was it primroses?
Time does really fly, or perhaps it's more like the sky--and smoke--"

George was puzzled. "What do you mean: time being like the sky and
smoke?"

"I mean the things that we have and that we think are so solid--they're
like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into. You
know how wreath of smoke g