She looked at him with an expression in which amusement and curiosity were blended.

“I congratulate you,” she said, laughing, “upon the career in which it appears I had the honor to start you.  Am I being told that you have taken up the law?”

“Not quite the whole of it as yet,” he said; “but when I am not doing errands for the office I am to some extent taken up with it,” and then he told her of his talk with his father and what had followed.  She overcame a refractory kink in her silk before speaking.

“It takes a long time, doesn’t it, and do you like it?” she asked.

“Well,” said John, laughing a little, “a weaker word than ‘fascinating’ would describe the pursuit, but I hope with diligence to reach some of the interesting features in the course of ten or twelve years.”

“It is delightful,” she remarked, scrutinizing the pattern of her work, “to encounter such enthusiasm.”

“Isn’t it?” said John, not in the least wounded by her sarcasm.

“Very much so,” she replied, “but I have always understood that it is a mistake to be too sanguine.”

“Perhaps I’d better make it fifteen years, then,” he said, laughing.  “I should have a choice of professions by that time at any rate.  You know the proverb that ‘At forty every man is either a fool or a physician.’” She looked at him with a smile.  “Yes,” he said, “I realize the alternative.”  She laughed a little, but did not reply.

“Seriously,” he continued, “I know that in everything worth accomplishing there is a lot of drudgery to be gone through with at the first, and perhaps it seems the more irksome to me because I have been so long idly my own master.  However,” he added, “I shall get down to it, or up to it, after a while, I dare say.  That is my intention, at any rate.”

“I don’t think I have ever wished that I were a man,” she said after a moment, “but I often find myself envying a man’s opportunities.”

“Do not women have opportunities, too?” he said.  “Certainly they have greatly to do with the determination of affairs.”

“Oh, yes,” she replied, “it is the usual answer that woman’s part is to influence somebody.  As for her own life, it is largely made for her.  She has, for the most part, to take what comes to her by the will of others.”

“And yet,” said John, “I fancy that there has seldom been a great career in which some woman’s help or influence was not a factor.”

“Even granting that,” she replied, “the career was the man’s, after all, and the fame and visible reward.  A man will sometimes say, ’I owe all my success to my wife, or my mother, or sister,’ but he never really believes it, nor, in fact, does any one else.  It is his success, after all, and the influence of the woman is but a circumstance, real and powerful though it may be.  I am not sure,” she added, “that woman’s influence, so called, isn’t rather an overrated thing.  Women like to feel that they have it, and men, in matters which they hold lightly, flatter them by yielding, but I am doubtful if a man ever arrives at or abandons a settled course or conviction through the influence of a woman, however exerted.”