As the school-teacher sat down John dragged a chair close and threw himself into it loungingly but with tightly folded arms. Dinwiddie hitched back as if unpleasantly near big machinery. John smiled.
"I'm glad to see you, Mr. Pettigrew. I've been wanting a chance to say something to you for some time, sir."
Pettigrew whispered a similar desire.
"Yes, sir," said John, and was silent. Then: "It's about my mother, sir. Your last call was your fourth, I believe." He frowned and waited while the pipe-clay of Mr. Pettigrew's complexion slowly took the tint of old red sandstone. Then he resumed: "You used to tell us boys it was our part not so much to accept the protection of the laws as to protect them—from their own mistakes no less than from the mistakes of those who owe them reverence—much as it becomes the part of a man to protect his mother. Wasn't that it?"
The school-master gave a husky assent.
"Well, Mr. Pettigrew, I'm a man, now, at least bodily—I think. Now, I'm satisfied, sir, that you hold my mother in high esteem—yes, sir, I'm sure of that—don't try to talk, sir, you only irritate your throat. I know you think as I do, sir, that one finger of her little faded hand is worth more than the whole bad lot of you and me, head, heart, and heels."
The listener's sub-acid smile protested, but John—
"I believe she thinks fairly well of you, sir, but she doesn't really know you. With me it's just the reverse. Hm! Yes, sir. You know, Mr. Pettigrew, my dear mother is of a highly wrought imaginative temperament. Now, I'm not. She often complains that I've got no more romance in my nature than my dear father had. She idealizes people. I can't. But the result is I can protect her against the mistakes such a tendency might even at this stage of life lead her into, for they say the poet's heart never grows old. You understand."
The school-master bowed majestically.
"My mother, Mr. Pettigrew, can never love where she can't idealize, nor marry where she can't love; she's too true a woman for that. I expect you to consider this talk confidential, of course. Now, I don't know, sir, that she could ever idealize you, but against the bare possibility that she might, I must ask you not to call again. Hm! That's all, sir."