Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/244

 own lack of credit in his mother’s mind. He discovered, beneath her silence, an incredulity like a bottomless pit, into which he had been pouring his confidences. Her proud opinion of him—which he had built up for himself on her supposed belief in his exploits—collapsed into that chasm. He had thought himself his mother’s right-hand man. He had been jealous of his sister Annie. His mother had always appeared to slight the girl in his favor, and to give him the place in her esteem to which his masculine superiority entitled him. Imagine the disillusionment of discovering that his mother had been protecting him from Annie—that she had been slighting the girl in order to preserve an appearance of equilibrium in her maternal affection—that she had assumed her partiality for him out of pity for his inferiority to his sister. Imagine the feelings of an anti-suffragist who learns that to Mother Nature the female is the more important sex.

It had taken him a week to find out where