n
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 the head waiters whom they had met at other hotels, and who were
working their way through Dar