"But, Tom," Milly would protest, anxiously, "Neddy couldn't be a changeling. He was never out of my sight for the first week—not even to be taken out of the room to be shown to people. Besides, he has your chin and my eyes."
"Well, if you really think so?" Thomas would demur. And Mrs. Dilworth always said, earnestly, that she was sure of it.
Still, in spite of eyes and chin, Ned's unpracticalness was an anxiety to his father, and his uncommunicativeness a constant irritation. Thomas himself was ready to share anything he possessed, money or opinions or hopes, with any friend, almost with any acquaintance. "I don't want to know anybody's business," he used to say; "I'm not inquisitive, Milly; you know I'm not. But I hate hiding things! Why shouldn't he say where he's going when he goes out in the evening? Sneaking off, as if he were ashamed."
"He just doesn't think of it," the mother would say, trying to smooth it over.
"Well, he ought to think of it," the father would grumble, eager to be smoothed.
But Milly found it harder to reconcile her husband to their boy's indifference to business than to his reserves.
"He sees fit to look down on the hardware trade," Tom told his wife, angrily. "'Well, sir,' I said to him the other day, 'it's given you your bread-and-butter for nineteen years; yes—and your fiddle, too, and your everlasting music lessons.' And I'll tell you what, Milly, a man who looks down on his business will find his business looking down on him. And it's a good business—it's a darned good business. If Ned doesn't have the sense to see it, he had better go and play his fiddle and hold out his hat for pennies."
Milly looked anxiously sympathetic.
"I don't know what is going to become of him," Thomas went on. "When you come to provide for three out of the hardware business, nobody gets very much."
Mrs. Dilworth was silent.