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 distinguished himself in his new work for about a year.  Then suddenly out of a clear sky came the astounding news that he had left the firm,—­actually resigned from Frothingham, Curtis, and Frothingham!—­and had gone up into the mountains, to manage a mine for some unknown person named Boone!  Mrs. Phelps shut her lips into a severe line when she heard this news, and for several weeks she did not write to Austin.  But as months went by, and he seemed always well and busy, and full of plans for a visit home, she forgave him, and wrote him twice weekly again,—­charming, motherly letters, in which newspaper clippings and concert programmes likely to interest him were enclosed, and amateur photographs,—­snapshots of Cornelia in her furs, laughing against a background of snowy Common, snapshots of Cornelia’s children with old Kelly in the motor-car, and of dear Taylor and Cornelia with Sally Middleton on the yacht.  Did Austin remember dear Sally?  She had grown so pretty and had so many admirers.