"But, if the light within thee be—"
He checked her with a sudden petulant lift of his head. And, after all, it was not quite her fault. Life, for her, had been so hard and so busy that he ought not to grudge her the consolation she had been able to dig up out of the accumulated débris of the ancestral trick of sermonizing. In a more gracious, plastic existence, she would have taken it out in Browning and the Russians; yet she was not necessarily more narrow because her literary artists were pre-Messianic. Neither was it the fault of those same artists that they were quoted in and out of season, and always for the purpose of clinching an obnoxious point.
"It isn't," he said, as quietly as he was able. Then the boyishness pent up within him came bursting out once more. "Listen, mother," he said impetuously. "Really, this thing has got to be talked out between us to the very dregs. We may as well face it now as ever, and come to the final conclusion. I know you started out to make me into a minister. I know you feel that it is the one great profession of them all. But is it?"
For a minute, her hands gripped each other; but they were underneath the hanging edge of tablecloth, and so invisible to Scott.
"What can be greater than to speak the truth that makes us free?" she questioned.
"Isn't there more than one kind of truth, mother?" he challenged her.
"How can there be?"
Again he shut his teeth and swallowed down his opposition. He was too immature to argue that there might be different facets to the selfsame truth.
"Listen, mother," he began again, when he had proved to himself that he could rely upon his self-control. "As I say, I started out to be a minister, to be another Parson Wheeler in fact, if not in name. I know it has been your dream to hear me preach, some day or other. And I know how you have pinched and scrimped and worked, to give me the education that I was bound to need."
"You have worked, too, Scott," she told him, in swift generosity. "You have tugged along and gone without things and worked hard, in your books and out of them. You know I have been proud of you; the credit for it isn't all mine, by any means."