"When I was young," she went on, "and things looked black, as they have a habit of looking to the young and inexperienced,"—that put in with a teasing smile for me,—"I used to say to myself, 'Well, anyhow, they can't kill me.' And the thought used to cheer me up wonderfully. In fact, it still does."
I no longer felt hopeless. I began to gnaw my troubles again—despair is still.
"Judge Granby is a dog," said I; "yes, a dog."
"Why 'dog'?" objected my mother. "Why not simply 'mean man'? I've never known a dog that could equal a man who set out to be 'ornery.'"
"When I think of all the work I've done for him in these three years—"
"For yourself," she interrupted. "Work you do for others doesn't amount to much unless it's been first and best for yourself."
"But he was benefited by it, too," I urged, "and has taken life easy, and has had more clients and bigger fees than he ever had before. I'd like to give him a jolt. I'd stop nagging him to put my name in a miserable corner of the glass in his door. I'd hang out a big sign of my own over my own office door."
My mother burst into a radiant smile. "I've been waiting a year to hear that," she said.
Thereupon I had a shock of fright—inside, for I'd never have dared to show fear before my mother. There's nothing else that makes you so brave as living with some one before whom you haven't the courage to let your cowardice show its feather. If we didn't keep each other up to the mark, what a spectacle of fright and flight this world-drama would be! Vanity, the greatest of vices, is also the greatest of virtues, or the source of the greatest virtues—which comes to the same thing.
"When will you do it?" she went on, and then I knew I was in for it, and how well-founded was the suspicion that had been keeping my lips tight-shut upon my dream of independence.