ttering "Poems?
Great Heavens!"

Frances looked after him steadily. "Oh, well!" she said to herself
presently.

She forced her mind back to the Quarterly article. It was a beginning
of just the kind of triumph that she always had expected for him. He
would soon be recognized by scientific men all over the world as their
confrere, especially after his year's study at Oxford.

When George was in his cradle she had planned that he should be a
clergyman, just as she had planned that he should be a well-bred man,
and she had fitted him for both roles in life, and urged him into them
by the same unceasing soft pats and pushes. She would be delighted
when she saw him in white robes serving at the altar.

Not that Frances had ever taken her religion quite seriously. It was
like her gowns, or her education, a matter of course; a trustworthy,
agreeable part of her. She had never once in her life shuddered at a
glimpse of any vice in herself, or cried to God in agony, even to grant
her a wish.

But she knew that Robert Waldeaux's son would be safer in the pulpit.
He could take rank with scholars there, too.

She inspected him now anxiously, trying to see him with the eyes of
these Oxford magnates. Nobody would guess that he was only twenty-two.
The bald spot on his crown and the spectacles gave him a scholastic
air, and the finely cut features and a cold aloofness in his manner
spoke plainly, she thought, of his good descent and high pursuits.

Frances herself had a drop of vagabond blood which found comrades for
her among every class and color. But there was not an atom of the
tramp in her son's well-built and fashionably clothed body. He never
had had a single intimate friend even when he was a boy. "He will
probably find his companions among the great English scholars," she
thought complacently. Of course she would always be his only comrade,
his chum. She continually met and parted with thousands of
people--they came and went. "But George and I will be together for all
time," she told herself.

He came up presently and sat down beside her, with an anxious,
apologetic air. It hurt him to think that he had laughed at her.
"That dark haze is the Jersey shore," he said. "How dim it grows!
Well, we are really out now in the big world! It is so good to be
alone there with you," he added, touching her arm affectionately.
"Those cynical old-men-boys at Harvard bored me."

"I don't bore you, then, George?"