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 have all the light I am likely to get, mother," he said steadily.