In the fall he would have to begin in earnest to prepare for whatever profession he was to follow. So far there had been no family discussion of this matter. Mrs. Lister had not quite given up her hopes that he might become a preacher. Of the other professions open to him, medicine, law, and teaching, she hoped that he would choose teaching. Then they could all stay here, forever.
As a matter of fact--alas, for poor Mrs. Lister!--Richard's plans were made, and of them in their entirety one person knew beside himself. Under Richard's satin there was steel. His life-work had been selected and he meant to begin to-morrow. His Commencement money would buy him a clavier and to it he intended to devote the summer. He could have it in his own room where it would disturb no one and where he could look upon it when he woke and practice upon it when he was supposed to be in bed. He knew that his mother was not fond of music, but his mother would let him have his way, had always let him have his way. He did not realize that thus far his way had been hers. In the fall he would go to study with Faversham in New York, and therefore it was probable that he would be at home no more. Thus lightly does youth arrange for itself. If poor Mary Alcestis could have looked into Richard's mind as he sat beside her at the dinner table when Commencement was over, and could there have read its hopes and plans so alien to her own, her heart would have been nearly broken.
Thomasina Davis was not sanguine about Mrs. Lister's easy yielding to Richard's wishes. She was prepared to talk to his parents by the hour if need be; she would have been willing to live on bread and water and go without shoes so that he should be able to study. She was determined to behold in him the fruit of her labors. Faversham had been a fellow pupil in the three happy years away from Waltonville; to send Richard Lister to him with supple, well-trained fingers and with fine taste, to have Richard say to him that he was a pupil of Thomasina Davis, was a reward she had promised herself since Richard had sat beside her piano on a high chair, enchanted by her music. Thomasina, unlike Mrs. Lister, had a profound respect, an adoration, indeed, for genius. This adoration was innate, but it owed its strength to certain events in her past, a past which seemed to Mrs. Lister to have been pathetically empty of most of women's joys.