"For what, mother?"

"Oh, a good many things. How do they live?"

"The Van Ostends?"

"Yes."

Champney Googe hugged his knees and rocked back and forth on the step
before he answered. His merry face seemed to lengthen in feature, to
harden in line. His mother left her chair and sewing to sit down on the
step beside him. She looked up inquiringly.

"Just as _I_ mean to live sometime, mother,"--his fresh young voice rang
determined and almost hard; his mother's eyes kindled;--"in a way that
expresses Life--as you and I understand it, and don't live it, mother;
as you and I have conceived of it while up here among these sheep
pastures." He glanced inimically for a moment at the barren slopes above
them. "I have you to thank for making me comprehend the difference." He
continued the rocking movement for a while, his hands still clasping his
knees. Then he went on:

"As for his home on the Avenue, there isn't its like in the city, and as
a storehouse of the best in art it hasn't its equal in the country; it's
just perfect from picture gallery to billiard room. As for adjuncts,
there's a shooting box and a _bona fide_ castle in the Scottish
Highlands, a cottage at Bar Harbor with the accessory of a steam yacht,
and a racing stud on a Long Island farm. As a financier he's great!"

He sat up straight, and freely used his fists, first on one knee then on
the other, to emphasize his words; "His right hand is on one great lever
of interstate traffic, his left on the other of foreign trade, and two
continents obey his manipulations. His eye exacts trained efficiency
from thousands; his word is a world event; Wall Street is his automaton.
Oh, the power of it all! I can't wait to get out into the stream,
mother! I'm only hugging the shore at present; that's what has made me
kick against this last year in college; it has been lost time, for I
want to get rich quick."

His mother laid her hand on his knee. "No, Champney, it's not lost time;
it's one of your assets as a gentleman."

He looked up at her, his blue eyes smiling into her dark ones.

"I can be a gentleman all right without that asset; you said father
didn't go."

"No, but the man for whom you are named went, and he told me once a
college education was a 'gentleman's asset.' That expression was his."

"Well, I don't see that the asset did him much good. It didn't seem to
discount his liabilities in other ways. Queer, how Uncle Louis went to
seed--I mean, didn'