All the evening I was watching and listening with her eyes and her ears everything he did, everything he said.  I so wanted Mother to like him!  I so wanted Mother to see how really fine and splendid and noble he was.  But that evening—­Why couldn’t he stop talking about the prizes he’d won, and the big racing car he’d just ordered for next summer?  There was nothing fine and splendid and noble about that.  And were his finger nails always so dirty?

Why, Mother would think—­

Mother did not stay in the room all the time; but she was in more or less often to watch the game; and at half-past nine she brought in some little cakes and lemonade as a surprise.  I thought it was lovely; but I could have shaken Paul when he pretended to be afraid of it, and asked Mother if there was a stick in it.

The idea—­Mother!  A stick!

I just knew Mother wouldn’t like that.  But if she didn’t, she never showed a thing in her face.  She just smiled, and said no, there wasn’t any stick in it; and passed the cakes.

When he had gone I remember I didn’t like to meet Mother’s eyes, and I didn’t ask her how she liked Paul Mayhew.  I kept right on talking fast about something else.  Some way, I didn’t want Mother to talk then, for fear of what she would say.

And Mother didn’t say anything about Paul Mayhew—­then.  But only a few days later she told me to invite him again to the house (this time to a chafing-dish supper), and to ask Carrie Heywood and Fred Small, too.

We had a beautiful time, only again Paul Mayhew didn’t “show off” at all in the way I wanted him to—­though he most emphatically “showed off” in his way!  It seemed to me that he bragged even more about himself and his belongings than he had before.  And I didn’t like at all the way he ate his food.  Why, Father didn’t eat like that—­with such a noisy mouth, and such a rattling of the silverware!

And so it went—­wise mother that she was!  Far from prohibiting me to have anything to do with Paul Mayhew, she let me see all I wanted to of him, particularly in my own home.  She let me go out with him, properly chaperoned, and she never, by word or manner, hinted that she didn’t admire his conceit and braggadocio.

And it all came out exactly as I suspect she had planned from the beginning.  When Paul Mayhew asked to be my escort to the class reception in June, I declined with thanks, and immediately afterwards told Fred Small I would go with him.  But even when I told Mother nonchalantly, and with carefully averted eyes, that I was going to the reception with Fred Small—­even then her pleasant “Well, that’s good!” conveyed only cheery mother interest; nor did a hasty glance into her face discover so much as a lifted eyebrow to hint, “I thought you’d come to your senses sometime!”

Wise little mother that she was!