him a little good. He came downstairs; he lighted a pipe (we are the
children of habit); he sat with his eyebrows painfully bent. People
called on him; he fiercely refused to see them.

For the first time in his life he turned his back on business. He sat
for hours by the fireplace. A fierce mental struggle wrenched him to
and fro.

Evening came, still he sat collapsed by the fireplace. From his
window, among other objects, two dwellings were visible; one, distant
four miles, was a whitewashed cottage, tiled instead of thatched,
adorned with creepers and roses and very clean, but in other respects
little superior to laborers' cottages.

The other, distant six long miles, was the Grassmere farmhouse, where
the Mertons lived; the windows seemed burnished gold this evening.

In the small cottage lived a plain old woman--a Methodist. She was
Meadows' mother.

She did not admire worldly people, still less envied them.

He was too good a churchman and man of business to permit conventicles
or psalm-singing at odd hours in his house. So she preferred living in
her own, which moreover was her own--her very own.

The old woman never spoke of her son, and checked all complaints of
him, and snubbed all experimental eulogies of him.

Meadows never spoke of his mother, paid her a small allowance with the