Why, only the week before his world had come to an end, he had said at dinner one evening that he wished he had a racing car of a certain expensive type, and his mother had done no more than lecture him mildly on the tendency of youth toward recklessness, and wonder afterwards how in the world the garage was going to be made larger without altogether destroying its symmetry and throwing it out of proportion to the rest of the place.  It would make the yard look very cramped, she complained, and she should be compelled to have her row of poinsettias moved.  And she very much doubted whether Jack would exercise any judgment at all about speed.  Boys were so wild and rough, nowadays!

Well, poor mother!  She had not been compelled to enlarge the garage; but Jack’s throat ached when he thought of that conversation.  What kind of a mother would she have been, he wondered, if he had petted her a little now and then?  He had an odd longing to give her a real bear-hug and rumple up her marcelled pompadour and kiss her—­and see if she wouldn’t turn out to be a human-being kind of a mother, after all.  He looked back and saw what a selfish, unfeeling young cub he had always been; how he had always taken, and had given nothing in return save a grudging obedience when he must, and a petty kind of deception when he might.

“Bless her heart, she’d have got me that racer and never batted an eye over the price of it,” he groaned, and turned over with his face hidden even from his bleak cave.  “I was always kicking over little things that don’t amount to a whoop—­and she was always handing out everything I asked for and never getting a square deal in her life.”  Then, to mark more definitely the change that was taking place in Jack’s soul, he added a question that a year before would have been utterly impossible.  “How do I know that dad ever gave her a square deal, either?  I never saw dad since I was a kid.  She’s proud as the deuce—­there must be some reason—­”

Once full-formed in his mind, the conviction that he had been a poor sort of a son to a mother whose life had held much bitterness grew and flourished.  He had called her cold and selfish; but after all, her life was spent mostly in doing things for the betterment of others—­as she interpreted the word.  Showy, yes; but Jack told himself now that she certainly got away with it better than any woman he knew.  And when it came to being cold and selfish, it struck Jack forcibly that he had been pretty much that way himself; that he had been just as fully occupied in playing with life as his mother had been in messing around trying to reform life.  When he came to think of it, he could see that a woman of Mrs. Singleton Corey’s type might find it rather difficult to manifest tenderness toward a husky young son who stood off from her the way Jack had done.  Judgment is, after all, a point of view, and Jack’s viewpoint was undergoing a radical change.