occupation. "The idea of a lady running an Iron Works!" he said
to David, who tried rather half-heartedly to comfort him; David
was complacently sure that _his_ mother wouldn't run an Iron
Works! "I hate the whole caboodle," Blair said, angrily. It was
his old shrinking from "ugliness." And everything at home was
ugly;--the great old house in the midst of Maitland's Shantytown;
the darkness and grime of it; the smell of soot in the halls;
Harris's slatternly ways; his mother's big, beautiful, dirty
fingers. "When she sneezes," Blair said, grinding his teeth, "I
could--swear! She takes the roof off." He grew hot with shame
when Mrs. Richie, whom he admired profoundly, came to take supper
with his mother at the office table with its odds and ends of
china. (As the old Canton dinner service had broken and fire-
cracked, Harris had replenished the shelves of the china-closet
according to his own taste limited by Mrs. Maitland's economic
orders.) Blair found everything hideous, or vulgar, or
uncomfortable, and he said so to Nannie with a violence that
betrayed real suffering. For it is suffering when the young
creature finds itself ashamed of father or mother. Instinctively
the child is proud of the parent, and if youth is wounded in its
tenderest point, its sense of conventionality--for nothing is as
conventional as adolescence--that natural instinct is headed off,
and of course there is suffering. Mrs. Maitland, living in her
mixture of squalor and dignity, had no time to consider such
abstractions. As for there being anything unwomanly in her
occupation, such an idea never entered her head. To Sarah
Maitland, no work which it was a woman's duty to do could be
unwomanly; she was incapable of consciously aping masculinity,
but to earn her living and heap up a fortune for her son, was, to
her way of thinking, just the plain common sense of duty. But