No More Learning

In this room the dressmaker sat
twice a year, and here the rector's wife used every month or so to
drink a cup of tea. It was quite clean. There was not a fly-mark on the
mirror, and all summer the fern in the grate was constantly changed.
Behind this room and overlooking the garden was the parlour, where
cane-bottomed chairs took the place of mahogany. Sherman had lived here
with his mother all his life, and their old servant hardly remembered
having lived anywhere else; and soon she would absolutely cease to
remember the world she knew before she saw the four walls of this
house, for every day she forgot something fresh. The son was almost
thirty, the mother fifty, and the servant near seventy. Every year they
had two hundred pounds among them, and once a year the son got a new
suit of clothes and went into the drawing-room to look at himself in
the mirror.

On the morning of the 10th of December Mrs. Sherman was down before her
son. A spare, delicate-featured woman, with somewhat thin lips tightly
closed as with silent people, and eyes at once gentle and distrustful,
tempering the hardness of the lips. She helped the servant to set the
table, and then, for her old-fashioned ideas would not allow her to
rest, began to knit, often interrupting her knitting to go into the
kitchen or to listen at the foot of the stairs. At last, hearing a
sound upstairs, she put the eggs down to boil, muttering the while,
and began again to knit. When her son appeared she received him with a
smile.

'Late again, mother,' he said.

'The young should sleep,' she answered, for to her he seemed still a
boy.
She had finished her breakfast some time before the young man, and
because it would have appeared very wrong to her to leave the table,
she sat on knitting behind the tea-urn: an industry the benefit of
which was felt by many poor children--almost the only neighbours she
had a good word for.

'Mother,' said the young man, presently, 'your friend the _locum
tenens_ is off to-day. '

'A good riddance. '

'Why are you so hard on him? He talked intelligently when here, I
thought,' answered her son.

'I do not like his theology,' she replied, 'nor his way of running
about and flirting with this body and that body, nor his way of
chattering while he buttons and unbuttons his gloves. '

'You forget he is a man of the great world, and has about him a manner
that must seem strange to us. '

'Oh, he might do very well,' she answered, 'for one of those Carton
girls at the rectory. '

'That eldest girl is a good girl,' replied her son.

'She looks down on us all, and thinks herself intellectual,' she
went on. 'I remember when girls were content with their catechism
and their Bibles and a little practice at the piano, maybe, for an
accomplishment. What does any one want more? It is all pride. '

'You used to like her as a child,' said the young man.

'I like all children. '

Sherman having finished his breakfast, took a book of travels in one
hand and a trowel in the other and went out into the garden.