The Brentons | Page 3

said, a little bit imperiously considering his age; "no
matter now about Catie. I want to talk to you about--"
"About?" she queried nervously, while he hesitated under what
obviously was a pretext of picking out the brownest sausage.
"About--myself."
Her nervousness increased.
"Take some more gravy, Scott," she urged him hurriedly. "You'd better
dip it on your bread as soon as you can; it gets cold so soon, these
winter mornings."
But he ignored the spoon she offered him. When he spoke, it was with
a curious hesitation.
"Mother, did I tell you what Professor Mansfield said?"
"Yes."
"Weren't you glad--just a very little?" His tone was boyish in its
pleading.
Mrs. Brenton's answer was evasive.
"Of course, Scott. I am always glad, when your teachers speak well of
you," she said.
"Yes; but think of it," he urged impatiently. "I hate to brag, mother; but
do you take in all he meant: that he saw no reason, if I kept on, that I
should not make a record as a chemist?"
While he spoke, his gray eyes were fixed on her imploringly. Under
some conditions and in some connections, she would have been swift to
read in them the text of his unspoken prayer; but not now. Her ancestral
tendencies forbade: those and the doubts which centred in her son's

other heritage, less orthodox and far, far less under the domination of
the spiritual. Now and then the boy looked like his father, astoundingly
like, and disturbingly. This was one of the times.
Across his young enthusiasm, her answer fell like a wet linen sheet.
"But are you going to keep on?"
He tried to regain his former accent.
"That is what I want to decide, right now," he said as buoyantly as he
was able. "Of course, it isn't just what I started out to do; but he seemed
to feel it was my chance, and you and I, both of us, have been used to
taking any chance that came. What do you think I'd better do?"
For a moment, she worked fussily at the twisted wire leg of the tile that
held the coffee pot. Her eyes were still upon the wire, when at last she
answered.
"You must do as you think right, my son."
"But what do you really think, yourself?" he urged her.
This time, she lifted her eyes until they rested full upon his own.
"It isn't exactly what we have planned it all for, Scott. Still, it may be
that this will be the next best thing, after all."
"Then you would be disappointed, if I took the chance?"
She felt the edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his
half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for
fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so should hurt
him.
"Do you need to decide just now?" she asked evasively.
"Between now and next summer."

"Why not wait till then?"
He crossed her question with another.
"What's the use of waiting?"
"You may get more light on it, if you wait," she said gravely.
Scott shut his teeth hard upon an end of sausage. It seemed to him that
it was only one more phase of the same futile whole, when his teeth
encountered a hard bit of bone. And his mother sat there, outwardly
impartial, inwardly disapproving, and talked about more light, when
already his young eyes were blinded by the lustrous dazzle. Oh, well! It
was all in the day's work, all in the difference between nineteen and
thirty-nine, he told himself as patiently as he was able. And his mother
at thirty-nine, he realized with disconcerting clearness, was infinitely
older than Professor Mansfield's wife at sixty. Indeed, he sometimes
wondered if she ever had been really young, ever really young enough
to forget her heritage of piety in healthy, worldly zeal. Whatever the
depths of one's filial devotion, it sometimes jars a little to have one's
mother use, by choice, the phraseology of the minor prophets. In fact,
in certain of his more unregenerate moments, Scott Brenton had
allowed himself to marvel that he had not been christened Malachi. At
least, it would have been in keeping with the habitual tone of the
domestic table talk. And yet, in other moments, he realized acutely that
that same heritage was in his nature, too. The village gossips had been
exceedingly benevolent, in that they had spared him any inkling of the
sources whence had come certain other strains which set his blood to
tingling every now and then.
Just such a strain was tingling now, as he laid down his knife and fork,
rested his elbows on the table before him and clasped his hands tight
above his plate.
"I think I