we're engaged!" thought Manzanita, with a pang of utter
surprise. "She knows why I came!" Mrs. Phelps said triumphantly to
herself.

For Mrs. Phelps was a determined woman, and in some ways a merciless
one. She had been born with Bostonian prejudices strong within her. She
had made her children familiar, in their very nursery days, with the
great names of their ancestors. Cornelia, when a plain,
distinguished-looking child of six, was aware that her nose was "all
Slocumb," and her forehead just like "great-aunt Hannah Maria Rand
Babcock's." Austin learned that he was a Phelps in disposition, but
"the image of the Bonds and the Baldwins." The children often went to
distinguished gatherings composed entirely of their near and distant
kinspeople, ate their porridge from silver bowls a hundred years old,
and even at dancing-school were able to discriminate against the
beruffled and white-clad infants whose parents "mother didn't know." In
due time Austin went to a college in whose archives the names of his
kinsmen bore an honorable part; and Cornelia, having skated and studied
German cheerfully for several years, with spectacles on her
near-sighted eyes, her hair in a club, and a metal band across her big
white teeth, suddenly blossomed into a handsome and dignified woman,
who calmly selected one Taylor Putnam Underwood as the most eligible of
several possible husbands, and proceeded to set up an irreproachable
establishment of her own.

All this was as it should be. Mrs. Phelps, a bustling little figure in
her handsome rich silks, with her crisp black hair severely arranged,
and her crisp voice growing more and more pleasantly positive as years
went by, fitted herself with dignity into the role of mother-in-law and
grandmother. Cornelia had been married several years. When Austin came
home from college, and while taking him proudly with her on a round of
dinners and calls, his mother naturally cast her eye about her for the
pearl of women, who should become his wife.

Austin, it was understood, was to go into Uncle Hubbard Frothingham's
office. All the young sons and nephews and cousins in the family
started there. When Austin, agreeing in the main to the proposal,
suggested that he be put in the San Francisco branch of the business,
Mrs. Phelps was only mildly disturbed. He had everything to lose and
nothing to gain by going West, she explained, but if he wanted to, let
him try California.

So Austin went, and quite