Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/95

 slowly. When he turned around, his father had sat down in his easy chair and taken up his book. Don understood that judgment had been rendered, and started awkwardly toward the door. It seemed a great distance across the room. He had his hand on the door-knob when his father added: 'Meanwhile, for your mother's sake if not for your own, you will go to church and try to behave yourself."

Don got himself out, in silence, with his ears burning. As he closed the door behind him, he heard his father strike a match.

Crestfallen, dismissed with all his heroic insubordination unnoticed, he went upstairs ashamed of himself, and—in spite of himself—admiring the strength that had taken him up, considered him briefly, given him a curt decision, and then turned to other matters with the calm re-lighting of a pipe. For a moment, he doubted whether this old brain might not know what was best for him to do; whether he would not be wise to study law and be at peace with his father. But it was only for a moment. Law was to him a dead and dried collection of classified statutes, printed in old books, in a formal jargon as repellent as the scientific names on a museum of beetles. Life as a lawyer would be life in a musty library with a continual droning of court arguments coming to him through green baise doors, and all the sunlight and freedom of love and happiness beating on the closed windows that shut him in. He shook his head, drawing a long breath of relief. He was free. He had five months in which to choose a career. All the world