His stepmother put the dish of potatoes back upon the table and took up the pitcher of buttermilk.  Her hand was trembling nervously.  There was a slight gasp in her voice when she spoke.

“I don’t know but what it’s as big a thing to be in a fine store like that as ’tis to be a lawyer,” she said.

For a moment Nicholas did not answer.  His eyes grew darker as she stood before him, and a shadow closed upon his face.  As in a frame, he saw the outline of her figure defined against the square of falling rain between the window sashes.  Her shoulders, bent slightly forward as if crushed by the bearing of heavy burdens, reminded him of a domestic animal, full of years and labour.

His face softened and he smiled into her eyes.

“Yes, I don’t know but what it is just as well,” he responded cheerfully.  The next day he went into Jerry Pollard’s store and began his winter’s work.  He measured off unbleached cotton cloth for a servant girl; sold a pair of shoes to a farmer, a cravat to a young fellow from the grocery shop next door, and a set of garden tools to an elderly lady who lived in the street facing the asylum and had a greenhouse.  At odd times he looked over Jerry Pollard’s books, and after dark he dunned several debtors for unpaid bills.  He did it quietly and thoroughly, neither shirking nor overelaborating the minutest detail.  There are men who have an immense capacity for taking pains that is rarer than genius, and he was one of them.  Whether he made a success or a failure of life, he would do it with a conscientious use of opportunities, good or bad.  An eye that is trained to detect the values of circumstances, and a hand that is quick to adjust them, have produced the mental forces that make or unmake the race.

When the day was over he went home and ascended to his room in silence.  The work had left him with a curious irritating sense of its distastefulness.  The second day was as the first—­the week was as the month.  There were no variations, no difficulties, no advancement.  With the round of monotony his irritation sharpened.  When Jerry Pollard spoke he responded in monosyllables; when Jerry Pollard’s pretty daughter, Bessie, smiled in from the doorway, he kept his eyes on the counter.  At home he was even less responsive.  The impulse which had prompted him to return a cheering falsehood to his stepmother passed quickly.  He sacrificed himself to the family interests, but he sacrificed himself begrudgingly.  His face assumed lines of sullen repression; the tones of his voice were full of subdued resentment.  He found satisfaction in meeting their overtures with irony, their constraint with callousness.  Since he had given the one thing they required and he valued, he justified himself in a series of petty tyrannies.  He met his stepmother with avoidance, his father with aversion.  The children he swore at or ignored.  Amos Burr, gathering his slow wits together, regarded him with a chuckle of self-congratulation.  His sensibilities were not susceptible to slight friction, and his son’s attitude seemed to him of small significance.  He had got what he wanted, and that was sufficient unto the hour.