she made a little pause in the obscurer light of the close-shuttered
corridor, while she said: "I liked her daughter the best."

"Yes?" he returned. "I--never felt very well acquainted with her, I
believe. One couldn't get far with her. Though, for the matter of that,
one didn't get far with Mrs. Vostrand herself. Did you think Genevieve
was much influenced by her mother?"

"She didn't seem a strong character."

"No, that was it. She was what her mother wished her to be. I've often
wondered how much she was interested in the marriage she made."

Cynthia let a rustic silence ensue, and Westover shrank again from the
inquisition he longed to make.

It was not Genevieve Vostrand's marriage which really concerned him, but
Cynthia's engagement, and it was her mind that he would have liked to
look into. It might well be supposed that she regarded it in a perfect
matter-of-fact way, and with no ambition beyond it. She was a country
girl, acquainted from childhood with facts of life which town-bred girls
would not have known without a blunting of the sensibilities, and why
should she be different from other country girls? She might be as good
and as fine as he saw her, and yet be insensible to the spiritual
toughness of Jeff, because of her love for him. Her very goodness might
make his badness unimaginable to her, and if her refinement were from the
conscience merely, and not from the tastes and experiences, too, there
was not so much to dread for her in her marriage with such a man. Still,
he would have liked, if he could, to tell her what he had told her father
of Durgin's behavior with Lynde, and let her bring the test of her
self-devotion to the case with a clear understanding. He had sometimes
been afraid that Whitwell might not be able to keep it to himself; but
now he wished that the philosopher had not been so discreet. He had all
this so absorbingly in mind that he started presently with the fear that
she had said something and he had not answered, but when he asked her he
found that she had not spoken. They were standing at an open window
looking out upon Lion's Head, when he said: "I don't know how I shall
show my gratitude to Mrs. Durgin and you for thinking of having me up
here. I've done a picture of Lion's Head that might be ever so much
worse; but I shouldn't have dreamed of getting at it if it hadn't been
for you, though I've so often dreamed of doing it. Now I shall go home
richer in every sort of way-tha