and weakened
it. When it finally appeared that her ambition for her son was not his
ambition for himself and would never be, she abandoned it. Perhaps it
was the easier for her to forego her hopes of his distinction in the
world, because she had learned before that she must forego her hopes of
him in other ways. She had vaguely fancied that with the acquaintance
his career at Harvard would open to him Jeff would make a splendid
marriage. She had followed darkling and stumbling his course in society
as far as he would report it to her, and when he would not suffer her to
glory in it, she believed that he was forbidding her from a pride that
would not recognize anything out of the common in it. She exulted in
his pride, and she took all his snubbing reserves tenderly, as so many
proofs of his success.

At the bottom of her heart she had both fear and contempt of all
towns-people, whom she generalized from her experience of them as summer
folks of a greater or lesser silliness. She often found herself unable
to cope with them, even when she felt that she had twice their sense;
she perceived that they had something from their training that with
all her undisciplined force she could never hope to win from her own
environment. But she believed that her son would have the advantages
which baffled her in them, for he would have their environment; and she
had wished him to rivet his hold upon those advantages by taking a wife
from among them, and by living the life of their world. Her wishes, of
course, had no such distinct formulation, and the feeling she had toward
Cynthia as a possible barrier to her ambition had no more definition.
There had been times when the fitness of her marriage with Jeff had
moved the mother's heart to a jealousy that she always kept silent,
while she hoped for the accident or the providence which should annul
the danger. But Genevieve Vostrand had not been the kind of accident
or the providence that she would have invoked, and when she saw Jeff's
fancy turning toward her, Mrs. Durgin had veered round to Cynthia. All
the same she kept a keen eye upon the young ladies among the summer
folks who came to Lion's Head, and tacitly canvassed their merits and
inclinations with respect to Jeff in the often-imagined event of
his caring for any one of them. She found that her artfully casual
references to her son's being in Harvard scarcely affected their mothers
in the right way. The fact made them think of t