e, and have a pack of kids. One after another. One
after another. And a husband like Bert, so shocking jealous he can't see
her look at another man without going on like a mad thing. Not this
little girl."

Jenny never told her mother that half the attraction of boys' society
nowadays lay in the delight of making fools of them. If she had told her
Mrs. Raeburn might not have understood. Jenny was angry that her mother
should suspect her of being fast. She was sure of her own remoteness
from passionate temptation. She gloried in her security. She could not
imagine herself in love, and laughed heartily at girls who did. She was
engaged to sixteen boys in one year, to not one of whom was vouchsafed
the light privilege of touching her cheeks. They presented her with
cheap jewelry, which she never returned on the decease of affection, and
scarcely wore during its short existence. It was put away in a cigar-box
in a tangled heap of little petrified hearts.

Mrs. Raeburn, however, who beheld in these despised youths a menace to
her daughter's character, was never tired of dinning into her ears the
tale of Edith's disaster. The more she scolded, the more she held a
watch in her hand when Jenny came back from the theater, the more
annoying was Jenny, the longer did she delay her evening home-comings.

The fact that Bert and Edie had settled down into commonplace married
life did not make her regard more kindly the circumstance-impelled
conjunction. She reproduced in her mental view of the result something
of her mother's emotion immediately before her own birth. Long ago Mrs.
Raeburn had settled down into an unsatisfied contentment; long ago she
had renounced extravagance of hope or thought, merely keeping a hold on
laughter; but Jenny felt vaguely the waste of life, the waste of love,
the waste of happiness which such a marriage as Edie's suggested. She
could not have formulated her impressions. She had never been taught to
co-ordinate ideas. Her mind was a garden planted with rare shrubs whose
labels had been destroyed by a careless gardener, whose individual
existence was lost in a maze of rank weeds. Could the Fates have given
her a rich revenge for the waste of her intelligence, Jenny should have
broken the heart of some prominent member of the London School Board,
should have broken his heart and wrecked his soul, herself meanwhile
blown on by fortunate gales to Elysium.

May was often told of her sister's crusade, of t