Jane always called him the professor, a name which that individual accepted without comment, as he did everything else.  In fact, since he had been possessed of titular rights, but two people had ignored them—­his mother and Mary.  His mother had been dead—­oh, a very long time, and it was nineteen years and some months since Mary had followed her.  When Mary had died people said that Jane was coming to live with the professor; Jane came, and now people said quite unthinkingly that the professor lived with his sister.  Jane was high-minded, also strong-minded; her hair was very thin and very straight, a fact for which she was sternly and devoutly thankful.  Jane was stern and devout in everything—­even in cooking preserves.  To the professor, Jane had been surrounded by a sort of halo of preserves, ever since he had recovered from his awe of her unapproachable angularity as to allude to her before admiring play-mates as the “old maid.”

When the professor had married, Jane had strongly disapproved—­Mary’s cheeks were much too pink, her hands much too soft, and her ways of life led her into the flowery meadows of the world and the flesh, if not the devil.  The professor had been infatuated, and the year or so of married life seemed only to augment such infatuation, and incidentally Jane’s ire.  Well, the golden year was over, and the little butterfly had gone to its rest, fretfully, fearfully.  And then Jane wrote; wrote that the professor needed somebody to superintend him, to see that he did not take cold, and to cook his preserves; so she was coming.  The professor did not wish to be superintended, he wanted to take cold in comfort without being asked how he took it, and he abominated preserves; to all of which Jane was supremely indifferent.  Jane came; the professor wore overshoes and ate preserves—­meekly.

So the professor lived with his sister.  At first the direful system which ruled everything from the time of the cat’s entrance to the date when the furnace fire should be started, chafed on him.  His declarations of independence were received pityingly, as the prattles of a tired child.  Gradually he resigned himself, and the germs of discontent followed the wake of the other germs which Jane had promptly and forcefully annihilated.

So the years went on; in time the professor grew tired of ranting and mild objections gave way to sighs of resignation.  There had been bones to pick in plenty.  The professor had a sneaking fondness for dirt—­not mud, but historic dust, so to speak; Jane decreed all foreign matter as damned eternally.  The professor liked fiction; he had once in the first years of Jane’s rule started a novel, which having been inadvertently left in the living-room, was consigned to the flames; Jane had intimated, moreover, that the authors of such monstrosities would probably end in the embrace of the same element.  Whereupon the professor’s wrath was great; but his house was built on the sand; so was his novel; and five years afterwards he knew it.