Mrs. Ranger winced and shrank.  She knew how her question and the effort of that answer must have hurt the boy; but she did not make matters worse with words.  Indeed, she would have been unable to say anything, for sympathy would have been hypocritical, and hypocrisy was with her impossible.  She thought Arthur loved Janet; she realized, too, the savage wound to his pride in losing her just at this time.  But she had never liked her, and now felt justified in that secret and, so she had often reproached herself, unreasonable dislike; and she proceeded to hate her, the first time she had ever hated anybody—­to hate her as a mother can hate one who has made her child suffer.

After supper, Mrs. Ranger plunged into the household duties that were saving her from insanity.  Adelaide and Arthur went to the side veranda.  When Arthur had lighted a cigarette, he looked at it with a grim smile—­it was astonishing how much stronger and manlier his face was, all in a few hours.  “I’m on my last thousand of these,” said he.  “After them, no more cigarettes.”

“Oh, it isn’t so bad as all that!” said Adelaide.  “We’re still comfortable, and long before you could feel any change, you’ll be making plenty of money.”

“I’m going to work—­next Monday—­at the mills.”

Adelaide caught her breath, beamed on him.  “I knew you would!” she exclaimed.  “I knew you were brave.”

“Brave!” He laughed disagreeably.  “Like the fellow that faces the fight because a bayonet’s pricking his back.  I can’t go away somewhere and get a job, for there’s nothing I can do.  I’ve got to stay right here.  I’ve got to stare this town out of countenance.  I’ve got to get it used to the idea of me as a common workingman with overalls and a dinner pail.”

She saw beneath his attempt to make light of the situation a deep and cruel humiliation.  He was looking forward to the keenest torture to which a man trained in vanity to false ideals can be subjected; and the thing itself, so Adelaide was thinking, would be more cruel than his writhing anticipation of it.

“Still,” she insisted to him, “you are brave.  You might have borrowed of mother and gone off to make one failure after another in gentlemanly attempts.  You might have”—­she was going to say, “tried to make a rich marriage,” but stopped herself in time.  “Oh, I forgot,” she said, instead, “there’s the five thousand dollars.  Why not spend it in studying law—­or something?”

“I’ve lost my five thousand,” he replied.  “I paid it for a lesson that was cheap at the price.”  Then, thoughtfully, “I’ve dropped out of the class ‘gentleman’ for good and all.”

“Or into it,” suggested she.

He disregarded this; he knew it was an insincerity—­one of the many he and Del were now trying to make themselves believe against the almost hopeless handicap of the unbelief they had acquired as part of their “Eastern culture.”  He went on:  “There’s one redeeming feature of the—­the situation.”