she had been contemptuous; but she had never really cared. So it
appeared that they did not have even money in common. The earning
had been all hers; the spending had been all his. If she had
liked to buy gimcracks, they would have had that in common, and
perhaps he would have been fond of her? "But I never knew how to
be a fool," she thought, simply. Yes; she didn't know how to
spend, she only knew how to earn. Of course, if he had had to
earn what he spent, they would have had work as a bond of
sympathy. Work! Blair had never understood that work was the
finest thing in the world. She wondered why he had not understood
it, when she herself had worked so hard--worked, in fact, so that
he might be beyond the need of working. As she said that, her
fingers were suddenly rigid on her needles; it seemed as if her
soul had felt a jolt of dismay; why didn't her son understand the
joy of work? Because she had spared him all necessity for it!--
for the work she had given him to do was not real, and they both
knew it. Spared him? Robbed him! "_Who hath sinned, this man or
his parents?_" "This man," her selfish, indolent, dishonorable
son, or she herself, whose hurry to possess the one thing she
wanted, that finest thing in the world, Work!--had pushed him
into the road of pleasant, shameful idleness, the road that
always leads to dishonor? Good God! what a fool she had been not
to make him work.

Sarah Maitland, tramping back and forth, the ball of pink worsted
dragging behind her in a grimy tangle, thought these things with
a sledge-hammer directness that spared herself nothing. She
wanted the truth, no matter how it made her cringe to find it!
She would hammer out her very heart to find the truth. And the
truth she found was that she had never allowed Blair to meet the