"You've no right to talk to me that way. I'm your mother!..."
"You knew rightly he wouldn't have liked it," John continued, inexorably.
And then Mrs. MacDermott yielded.
"You're your da over again," she complained. "He always had his way in the end, whatever was against him. What do you want to be, then, when you grow up?"
"I don't know yet, ma. I only know the things I don't want to be, and teaching is one of them. And a minister's another! Mebbe I'll know in a wee while!"
He did not like to tell her that in his heart he wished to go in search of adventures. His Uncle Matthew's imaginings had filled his mind with romantic desires, and he longed to leave Ballyards and go somewhere ... anywhere, so long as it was a difficult and distant place ... where he would have to contend with dangers. There were times when he felt that he must instantly pack a bundle of clothes into a red handkerchief ... he could buy one at Conn's, the draper's ... and run away from home and stow himself in the hold of a big ship bound for America or Australia or some place like that ... and was only prevented from doing so by his fear that his mother and uncles would be deeply grieved by his flight. "It would look as if they hadn't been kind to me," he said in remonstrance to himself, "and that wouldn't be fair to them!" But although he did not run away from home, he still kept the strong desire in his heart to go out into a dangerous and bewildering world and seek fortune and adventures. "I want to fight things," he said to himself. "I want to fight things and, ... and win!"
Mixed up with his desire for adventure was a vision of a beautiful girl to whom he should offer his love and service. He could not picture her clearly to himself ... none of the girls in Ballyards bore the slightest resemblance to her. Sometimes, indeed, he thought that this beautiful girl was like Lady Castlederry ... only Lady Castlederry, somehow, although she was so very lovely, had a cold stupid look in her eyes, and he was very certain that this beautiful girl had bright, alert eyes.
There had been a passage of love-making between Aggie Logan and him, conducted entirely by Aggie Logan. She had taken him aside one day, in the middle of a game of "I spy," and had said to him "Will you court me, Johnnie?"
"No," he had replied.
"Do you not love me then?" she enquired.