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 Dartmouth or Williams or Yale, and it required all the force of Jeff’s robust personality to dissipate their erroneous impressions of him.  He took their daughters out of their arms and from under their noses on long drives upon his buckboard, and it became a convention with them to treat his attentions somewhat like those of a powerful but faithful vassal.

Whether he was indifferent, or whether the young ladies were coy, none of these official flirtations came to anything.  He seemed not to care for one more than another; he laughed and joked with them all, and had an official manner with each which served somewhat like a disparity of years in putting them at their ease with him.  They agreed that he was very handsome, and some thought him very talented; but they questioned whether he was quite what you would call a gentleman.  It is true that this misgiving attacked them mostly in the mass; singly, they were little or not at all troubled by it, and they severally behaved in an unprincipled indifference to it.

Mrs. Durgin had the courage of her own purposes, but she had the fear of Jeff’s.  After the first pang of the disappointment which took final shape from his declaration that he was going to marry Cynthia, she did not really care much.  She had the habit of the girl; she respected her, she even loved her.  The children, as she thought of them, had known each other from their earliest days; Jeff had persecuted Cynthia throughout his graceless boyhood, but he had never intimidated her; and his mother, with all her weakness for him, felt that it was well for him that his wife should be brave enough to stand up against him.

She formulated this feeling no more than the others, but she said to Westover, whom Jeff bade her tell of the engagement:  “It a’n’t exactly as I could ‘a’ wished it to be.  But I don’t know as mothers are ever quite suited with their children’s marriages.  I presume it’s from always kind of havin’ had her round under my feet ever since she was born, as you may say, and seein’ her family always so shiftless.  Well, I can’t say that of Frank, either.  He’s turned out a fine boy; but the father!  Cynthy is one of the most capable girls, smart as a trap, and bright as a biscuit.  She’s masterful, too! she need to have a will of her own with Jeff.”