“No,” she said honestly; “I don’t.  Babe hasn’t the make-up for a professional woman in any line.  She is too self-centred, too impetuous.  She needs something to humanize her womanhood, not make an abstract thing of her.  I’d rather see Babe a gentle, loving woman than the greatest light of her profession.”

“What a little bigot it is!” the doctor said teasingly.

“No, not a bigot,” she returned quickly.  “I believe in a girl’s taking a profession, when it is the one absorbing interest of her life.  It wouldn’t be so with Babe.  She would take it from restlessness, not love, from sheer unused vitality that must have an outlet.  It was different with Ted; it will be different with Allyn.  They are ready to give up other things for their work.  Phebe isn’t.”

“After all, Babe is developing,” the doctor said thoughtfully.  “She is steadier than she used to be, and a good deal more true and sincere.  If she would only grow a little more affectionate, I should be content.”

“Wait,” his wife repeated.  “She develops slowly, and she hasn’t found out yet just which way it is worth her while to grow.  When she does, you will find that she grows fast enough.  Look at Allyn.  He seems like a new creature in this new plan of his.”

The doctor smiled a little sadly.

“Perhaps I am impatient, Bess; but I am getting to be an old man, and I want to see all my children on their own straight roads, before I die.”

But if Phebe’s choice of career filled her family with doubtful questionings, their doubts were at an end in respect to Allyn.  The boy had not only come back from the seashore to settle down into the harness of school life again; he was even tugging hard at the traces.  Mindful of his bargain with his father, anxious to prove that his wish was both fixed and earnest, he had gone to work with a dogged determination to show his father that, once interested, he was capable of doing honest, solid work.  He did work with a will and with a healthy appetite that left him scant time and energy for outside things; and between his books and his drawings he was far too busy to heed the ways and the warts of Jamie Lyman and his kin.  Directly after their return to The Savins, the doctor had sent a package of Allyn’s drawings to one of his old-time classmates, now the head of a famous school of technology.  The answer which came back to him was prompt and full of enthusiasm, and Dr. McAlister, as he read it, felt his last regret leaving him that his son was to abandon his own profession.

Cicely, meanwhile, was mounting guard over Allyn’s languages, advising, admonishing and often helping him along the devious paths of syntax and subjunctives.  She had a good deal of time at her disposal.  She gave it to him freely, and unconsciously she gained as much as she gave, in her work with the boy.  Their comradeship was as perfect as was their unlikeness.  Each complemented the other, each modified the other, and both were far the better and the happier for the intimacy.  To be sure, their paths were not all of pleasantness and peace.  Both Cicely and Allyn were outspoken and hot-tempered; but their feuds now were measured by moments, not by days, and the overtures of peace were mutual.