Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/292

 pleased at this, and after they were inside her room, stood up on tiptoes and gave him another kiss.

He had never entirely recovered from his father's chance remark that Mother had been only twenty when she married. She must have been about as old as he was now when he first began to remember her. Just a girl,—and she had seemed older to him then than now.

He told her this as he unstrapped her valise. "You seem younger to me everytime I see you—lots younger now than when I was six or seven years old."

She laughed out. "I was a child myself when you were six or seven." She turned grave for a moment. "If I had you to bring up, now that I am a really grown person with a personality of my own and some experience of the world, I'd do it very differently. I'd make a better job of it."

"You made a good enough job," he protested mildly. "How can you look at me and think you could have done any better?"

She stopped her unpacking to laugh. "It just spoils a person for other forms of joking to live with one of you dry Crittendens. Other people's humor seems so flamboyant. I like the Crittendens," she pronounced judicially, "though I did waste about twenty years of my young life trying to make myself into one. I'm glad you're one. But if you try to make Martha into one—"

"Martha's one already," he told her triumphantly. "We're exactly alike—the way we think and do things. That's why we get on so well together." At this Neale's mother looked at him so hard that he felt a little annoyed, and turned the talk back to its earlier channel.

"How else would you have brought me up, I'd like to know?"

"I'd have taken dynamite to you," she informed him briskly.

"Dynamite?"

"Oh, you don't understand. And I daresay it would have been too early anyhow. You'll probably get your share of dynamite when your turn comes." She changed the subject: "How's business? Seriously!"