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Cornelia! Her heart reached Cornelia’s name with a homesick throb. Cornelia would be home from her club or concert or afternoon at cards now,–Mrs. Phelps did not worry herself with latitude or longitude,–she would be having tea in the little drawing-room, under the approving canvases of Copley and Gilbert Stuart. Her mother could see Cornelia’s well-groomed hands busy with the Spode cups and the heavy old silver spoons; Cornelia’s fine, intelligent face and smooth dark head well set off by a background of rich hangings and soft lights, polished surfaces, and the dull tones of priceless rugs.

“I beg your pardon?” she said, rousing herself.

“I asked you if you didn’t have a cat-fit when you realized that Aus was going to marry a girl you never saw?” Manzanita repeated with friendly enjoyment. Mrs. Phelps gave her only a few seconds’ steady consideration for answer, and then pointedly addressed her son.

“It sounds very strange to your mother, to have you called anything but Austin, my son,” she said.

“Manz’ita can’t spare the time,” he explained, adoring eyes on the girl, whose beauty, in the level light, was quite startling enough to hold any man’s eyes.

“And you young people are very sure of yourselves, I suppose?” the mother said, lightly, after a little pause. Austin only laughed comfortably, but Manzanita’s eyes came suddenly to meet those of the older woman, and both knew that the first gun had been fired. A color that was not of the sunset burned suddenly in the girl’s round cheeks. “She’s not glad 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.