“I guess we can get along without it, mamma,” Buddy answered her, with an ingratiating smile.  Even in the first seven years of one’s life, one learns the elementary principles of diplomacy.  He did not retire from the conversation, but he prudently changed the subject to what he considered a more pleasant channel.

“Dick likes you anyway, Jo,” he informed her soothingly.  “He likes you, winkers and all.  I can tell, all right.  When you go out for a ride he gives me nickels if I tell him where—­”

“Robert Ches—­”

“Oh, all right.”  Buddy’s tone was wearily tolerant.  “A man never knows what to talk about to women, anyway.  I’d hate to be married to ’em—­wouldn’t you, Ford?”

“A little boy like you—­” began his mother, somewhat pinker of cheeks than usual.

“I guess I’m pretty near a man, now.”  He turned his eyes to Ford, consciously ignoring the feminine members of his family.  “If I had a wife,” he stated calmly, “I’d snub her up to a post and then I’d talk to her about anything I damn pleased!”

Mrs. Kate rose up then in all the terrifying dignity of outraged motherhood, grasped Buddy by the wrist, and led him away, in the direction of the hairbrush, if one would judge by Buddy’s reluctance to go.

“So you are going to climb the—­Big Hill, are you?” Miss Josephine observed, when the two were quite alone.  “It is to be hoped, Mr. Campbell, that you won’t find it as steep as it looks—­from the bottom.”

Ford was not an adept at reading what lies underneath the speech of a woman.  To himself he accented the last three words, so that they overshadowed all the rest and made her appear to remind him where he stood—­at the bottom.

“I suppose a hollow does look pretty high, to a man down a well,” he retorted, glancing into his teacup because he felt and was resisting an impulse to look at her.

“One can always keep climbing,” she murmured, “and never give up—­” Miss Josephine, also, was tilting her teacup and looking studiously into it as if she would read her fortune in the specks of tea leaves there.

“Like the frog in the well—­that climbed one jump and fell back two!” he interrupted, but she paid no attention, and went on.

“And the reward for reaching the top—­”

“Is there supposed to be a reward?” Ford could not tell why he asked her that, nor why he glanced stealthily at her from under his eyebrows as he awaited her reply.

“There—­might—­there usually is a reward for any great achievement—­and—­” Miss Josephine was plainly floundering where she had hoped to float airily upon the surface.

“What’s the reward for—­climbing hills, for instance?” He looked at her full, now, and his lips were ready to smile.

Miss Josephine looked uneasily at the door.  “I—­really, I never—­investigated the matter at all.”  She gave a twitch of shoulders and met his eyes steadily.  “The inner satisfaction of having climbed the hill, I suppose,” she said, in the tone of one who has at last reached firm ground.  “Will you have more tea, Mr. Campbell?”