them happily married and in homes
of their own became the absorbing ambition of her life. To this end
she administered her social activities, with this purpose in view she
encouraged or discouraged her daughters' friendships with men. With the
worldly wisdom of which she had her own share she came to the conclusion
that ineligible men friends, that is, men friends unable to give her
daughters a proper setting in the social world, were to be effectively
eliminated. That the men of her daughters' choosing should be gentlemen
in breeding went without saying, but that they should be sufficiently
endowed with wealth to support a proper social position was equally
essential.

That Jack Maitland had somehow dropped out of the intimate circle of
friends who had in pre-war days made the Rectory their headquarters was
to her a more bitter disappointment than she cared to acknowledge even
to herself. Her son and the two Maitland boys had been inseparable in
their school and college days, and with the two young men her daughters
had been associated in the very closest terms of comradeship. But
somehow Captain Jack Maitland after the first months succeeding his
return from the war had drawn apart. Disappointed, perplexed, hurt, she
vainly had striven to restore the old footing between the young man and
her daughters. Young Maitland had taken up his medical studies for a
few months at his old University in Toronto and so had been out of touch
with the social life of his home town. Then after he had "chucked" his
course as impossible he had at his father's earnest wish taken up
work at the mills, at first in the office, later in the manufacturing
department. There was something queer in Jack's attitude toward his old
life and its associations, and after her first failures in attempting
to restore the old relationship her eldest daughter's pride and then her
own forbade further efforts.

Adrien, her eldest daughter, had always been a difficult child, and her
stay in England and later her experience in war work in France where for
three years she had given rare service in hospital work had somehow made
her even more inaccessible to her mother. And now the situation had been
rendered more distressing by her determination "to find something to
do." She was firm in her resolve that she had no intention of patiently
waiting in her home, ostensibly busying herself with social duties but
in reality "waiting if not actually angling for a man