negations of life--to meet those _No's_, which teach the
eternal affirmations of character. He had had everything; he had
done nothing. The result was as inevitable as the action of a law
of nature! In the illuminating misery of this terrible night, she
saw that she had given her son, as Robert Ferguson had said to
her once, "fullness of bread and abundance of idleness." And now
she was learning what bread and idleness together must always
make of a man.

Walking up and down the dimly lighted room, she had a vision of
her sin that made her groan. _She_ had made Blair what he
was: because it had been easy for her to make things easy for
him, she had given him his heart's desire, and brought leanness
withal to his soul. In satisfying her own hunger for work, she
had forgotten to give it to him, and he had starved for it! She
had left, by this time, far behind her the personal affront to
her of his reserves; she took meekly the knowledge that he did
not love her: she even thought of his marriage as unimportant, or
as important only because it was a symptom of a condition for
which she was responsible. And having once realized and accepted
this fact, there was only one solemn question in her mind:

"What am I going to do about it?"

For she believed, as other parents have believed before her--and
probably will go on believing as long as there are parents and
sons--she believed that she could, in some way or other, by the
very strength of her agonizing love, force into her son's soul
from the outside that Kingdom of God which must be within. "Oh,
what am I going to do?" she said to herself.