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"In the meantime, what are you going to do? It'll be a wheen of years yet before you can hope to get anything big done!" "Oh, I don't know about that," John answered confidently. "The MacDermotts are great people for getting their own way!" "Mebbe they are ... in Ballyards," Hinde retorted, "but this isn't Ballyards. And you can't spend all your time writing masterpieces.

John said. "If you do sell the shop, make whoever buys it change the name over the door. If the MacDermott family is not to be in control of it, then I'd like well for the name to be painted out altogether and the new name put in its place. I'd hate to think of anyone pretending the MacDermotts was still here, carrying on their old trade, and them mebbe not giving as good value as we gave.

Four generations of you in one house to be pleased and proud of, and I pray to God he'll let me live to see the fifth generation of the MacDermotts born here, too. I'm a great woman for clinging to my home, and I love to think of the generations coming one after the other in the same house that the family's always lived in.

"I'm going back to London this evening. Eleanor says she's going to stay here!..." "For good?" "Aye ... for good." "And you? When are you coming back?" "I'm not coming back. She'll have to come to me. You're always talking about the pride of the MacDermotts. Well, I'll show you some of it. I'll not put my foot inside this house till Eleanor comes back to me.

The MacDermotts have queer pride, John!" "I know they have, Uncle William. I have, too!" "And they wouldn't lie content in their graves if they thought their names was associated with bad value!" "You're taking it for granted, Uncle, I'll want to sell the shop. Mebbe, I won't. I'll mebbe not be good at anything else but the grocery.

"I'll make her want me 'til she's heartsore with wanting!" Uncle Matthew died three days later. He slipped out of life without ostentation or murmur. "The MacDermotts are not afeard to die," he had said to John at the beginning of his illness, and in that spirit he had died. In the morning, he had asked Mrs. MacDermott to look for Don Quixote in the attic and bring it to him, and she had done so.

The MacDermotts, he said, were a highly-respected family ... a MacDermott had been an elder of the church for generations past... and he would be very sorry, very sorry, indeed to do anything to upset them, but it was neither right nor reasonable to expect parents to rest content while their children were taught their lessons by a man who was both queer in his manner and very nearly a criminal ... for after all, he had spent a night in a prison-cell and had stood in the dock where thieves and forgers and wife-beaters and even murderers had stood!

If you can comfort your mind with the thought that this world is a romance, the way your Uncle Matthew did, then you'll mebbe be content, but I never saw any romance in it, and the only comfort I get from it is the thought that I'm keeping up a good name. The MacDermotts always gave good value for the money. I wouldn't mind if they put that on my gravestone!" He changed his tone abruptly.

His mother, he often observed, spoke more boastfully of the MacDermotts than either his Uncle William or his Uncle Matthew. John's final, overwhelming retort to her was this: "Would my da have liked me to be a minister?" "I never knew what your da liked," she retorted; "I only knew what he did!..." "Do you think he would have liked me to be a minister?" John persisted.

The tradition of the MacDermotts, their life in one place for generations and the respect with which they were greeted by their townsmen, gave immense pleasure to her, and her dearest dream was that John should continue in the place where his forefathers had lived, and that his son and his son's son should continue there, too! And so it was that she was always telling John not to do things.