That in itself was no novelty to her experience of a metropolitan and distinguished society: what now kept Jason in her thoughts was the fact that he had made his capability serve his mood; he had taken himself out into the world and there, with what he was, succeeded. His was not an ineffectual condition--a longing, a possibility that, without the power of accomplishment, degenerated into a mere attitude of bitterness. Just such a state, for example, as enveloped herself.
The carriage had climbed out of Cottarsport, to the crown of the height under which it lay, and Honora ordered Coggs, a coachman decrepit with age, to stop. She half turned and looked down over the town with a veiled, introspective gaze. From here it was hardly more than a narrow rim of roofs about the bright water, broken by the white bulk of her dwelling and the courthouse square. The hills, turning roundly down, were sere and showed everywhere the grey glint of rock; Cottar's Neck already appeared wintry; a diminished wind, drawing in through the Narrows, flattened the smoke of the chimneys below.
Cottarsport! The word, with all its implications, was so vivid in her mind that she thought she must have spoken it aloud. Cottarsport and the Canderays--now one solitary woman. She wondered again at the curious and involved hold the locality had upon her; its tyranny over her birth and destiny. It was comparatively easy to understand the influence the place had exerted on her father: commencing with his sixteenth year, his life had been spent, until his retirement from the sea, in arduous voyages to far ports and cities. His first command--the anchor had been weighed on his twentieth birthday--had been of a brig to Zanzibar for a cargo of gum copal; his last a storm-battered journey about, apparently, all the perilous capes of the world. Then he had been near fifty, and the space between was a continuous record of struggle with savage and faithless peoples, strange latitudes and currents, and burdensome responsibilities.
Her mother, too, presented no insuperable obstacle to a sufficient comprehension--a noted beauty in a gay and self-indulgent society, she had passed through a triumphant period without forming any attachment. An inordinate amount of champagne had been uncorked in her honor, compliment and service and offers had made up her daily round; until, almost impossibly exacting, she had found herself beyond her early radiance, in the first tragic realization of decline. Stopping, perhaps, in the midst of slipping her elegance of body into a party dress, she remembered that she was thirty-five--just Honora's age at present. The compliments and offers had lessened, she was in a state of weary revulsion when Ithiel Canderay--bronzed and despotic and rich--had appeared before her and, the following day, urged marriage.