fe as the supreme woman of the human race, his idol
until death, his mother.

She now looked worthy of such an ideal. But it was upon him that her
heart lavished every possible extravagance when nightly he had laid
aside the coarse half-ragged fighting clothes of the streets. In those
after years when he was to gaze backward across a long distance, he must
be made to realize that when he was a little fellow, it was his mother
who first had seen his star while it was still low on the horizon; and
that from the beginning she had so reared him that there would be
stamped upon his attention the gentleness of his birth and a mother's
resolve to rear him in keeping with this through the neediest hours.

While he was in his bath, she, as though she were his valet, had laid
out trim house shoes and black stockings; and as the spring-night had a
breath of summer warmth, of almost Southern summer warmth, she had put
out also a suit of white linen knickerbockers. Under his broad sailor
collar she herself had tied a big, soft, flowing black ribbon of the
finest silk. Above this rose the solid head looking like a sphere on a
column of triumph, with its lustrous bronzed hair, which, as she brushed
it, she had tenderly stroked with her hands; often kissing the bronzed
face ardent and friendly to the world and thinking to herself of the
double blue in his eyes, the old Saxon blue of battle and the old Saxon
blue of the minstrel, also.

It was the evening meal that always brought them together after the
separation of the day, and he was at once curious to hear how everything
had gone at the art school. With some unsold papers under his arm he had
walked with her to the entrance, a new pang in his breast about her that
he did not understand: for one thing she looked so plain, so common. At
the door-step she had stopped and kissed him and bade him good-by. Her
quiet quivering words were:

"Go home, dear, by way of the cathedral."

If he took the more convenient route, it would lead him into one of the
city's main cross streets, beset with dangers. She would be able to sit
more at peace through those hours of posing if she could know that he
had gone across the cathedral grounds and then across the park as along
a country road bordered with young grass and shrubs in bloom and forest
trees in early leaf. She wished to keep all day before her eyes the
picture of him as straying that April morning along such a country
road--sometimes the