bellion symbolized for his step-mother
her own long struggle against the Leath conventions, and he understood
that if Anna so passionately abetted him it was partly because, as she
owned, she wanted his liberation to coincide with hers.

The lady who was to represent, in the impending struggle, the forces of
order and tradition was seated by the fire when Darrow entered. Among
the flowers and old furniture of the large pale-panelled room, Madame
de Chantelle had the inanimate elegance of a figure introduced into a
"still-life" to give the scale. And this, Darrow reflected, was exactly
what she doubtless regarded as her chief obligation: he was sure she
thought a great deal of "measure", and approved of most things only
up to a certain point. She was a woman of sixty, with a figure at once
young and old-fashioned. Her fair faded tints, her quaint corseting,
the passementerie on her tight-waisted dress, the velvet band on her
tapering arm, made her resemble a "carte de visite" photograph of the
middle sixties. One saw her, younger but no less invincibly lady-like,
leaning on a chair with a fringed back, a curl in her neck, a locket
on her tuckered bosom, toward the end of an embossed morocco album
beginning with The Beauties of the Second Empire.

She received her daughter-in-law's suitor with an affability which
implied her knowledge and approval of his suit. Darrow had already
guessed her to be a person who would instinctively oppose any suggested
changes, and then, after one had exhausted one's main arguments,
unexpectedly yield to some small incidental reason, and adhere doggedly
to her new position. She boasted of her old-fashioned prejudices, talked
a good deal of being a grandmother, and made a show of reaching up to
tap Owen's shoulder, though his height was little more than hers.

She was full of a small pale prattle about the people she had seen
at Ouchy, as to whom she had the minute statistical information of a
gazetteer, without any apparent sense of personal differences. She said
to Darrow: "They tell me things are very much changed in America...Of
course in my youth there WAS a Society"...She had no desire to return
there she was sure the standards must be so different. "There are
charming people everywhere...and one must always look on the best
side...but when one has lived among Traditions it's difficult to adapt
one's self to the new ideas...These dreadful views of marriage...it's
so hard to explain th