ut Jacky! He don't steal, and he
don't swear,--much; and he's never been pinched, and he's awful
handsome; and, my God! what more do you want? I ain't going to make his
life miserable by tellin' him to talk grammar, or do the polite act!"

"Lily, I only mean I want him to turn out well, and he won't unless he
tells the truth--"

"He'll turn out good. You needn't worry. Anybody's got to have sense
about telling the truth; you can't just plunk everything out! I--I
believe I'll go and live in New York."

Instantly Maurice was silenced. "She _mustn't_ take him away!" he
thought, despairingly.

His fear that she would do so was a constant worry.... His work in the
Weston real-estate office involved occasional business trips of a few
days, and his long hours on trains were filled with this increasing
anxiety about Jacky. "If she takes him away from Mercer, and I can't
ever see him, nothing can save him! But, damn it! what can I do?" he
would say. He tried to reassure himself by counting up Lily's good
points; her present uprightness; her honest friendliness to him; her
almost insane devotion to Jacky, and her pathetic aspiration for
respectability, which was summed up in that one word of collective
emptiness,--"Society." But immediately her bad points clamored in his
mind; her ignorance and unmorality and vulgarity. "Truth is just a
matter of expediency with her. If he gets to be a liar, I'll boot him!"
Maurice would think of these bad points until he got perfectly frantic!
His sense of wanting advice was like an ache in his mind--for there was
no one who could advise him. Then, quite unexpectedly, advice came....

In the fall the Houghtons got back from Europe. Maurice saw them only
between trains in Mercer, for Henry Houghton was in a great hurry to get
up to Green Hill, and Edith, too, was exercised about her trunks and the
unpacking of her treasures of reminiscence. But Mrs. Houghton said: "We
shall be coming down to do some shopping before Christmas. No! We'll
_not_ inflict ourselves upon Eleanor! We'll go to the hotel; you will
both take dinner with us."

They came, and Maurice and Eleanor dined with them, as Mrs. Houghton had
insisted that they should; but only Mrs. Houghton accepted Eleanor's
repaying hospitality.

"Mother has virtue enough for the family," Edith said; "I'm going to
stay here with father."

"It will be a jewel in your crown," Henry Houghton told his Mary.

"Why not collect jewels for your c