Moreover, nothing could be more positive than that if Morty's father had
made a fortune in his own day, and the son inherited and administered it
with the canny vigilance which distinguished the sons of rich men to-day
from the mad spendthrifts of a former generation, he would be as logically
intimate with those young capitalists who were the renewed pillars of San
Francisco society, as she was with the most aloof and important of her own
sex.
She had heard Judge Lawton and other men say that if a man were still a
clerk at thirty he was hopeless. The ruts were packed with the mediocre
whose destiny was the routine work of the world, whatever might be their
secret opinions of their unrecognized abilities and their resentment
against a system that anchored them.
The young man of brains and initiative, of energy, ambition, vision
and balance, provided he were honorable as well, and temperate in his
pleasures, was the man the eager world was always waiting for.
Alexina knew that the United States was almost as prolific in this fine
breed of young men as she still was in opportunities for the exceptional of
every class.
And it was possible that Mortimer was not one of them.
Once more she put a fact into bald words. She knew that her butterfly youth
had come to an end with her mother's death, and for a year she should be
very much alone, to say nothing of her new burden of responsibilities.
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