“He’s one of the best fellows in the state—one of the best anywhere. He’ll make you a first-rate husband. You’re a lucky girl.”
“I know I am. You needn’t tell me. There are not many men anywhere like Jack Duffy. I’ve always said I wouldn’t marry the tag, rag and bobtail other girls are satisfied with. My husband was going to be a gentleman, and if Jack’s anything, he’s that.”
“You’re right there. He’s one of Nature’s gentlemen—the real kind.”
Cornelia thought this savored of condescension, and said, rallying to the defense of her future lord,
“Well, that’s all right, but he’s educated too. He’s not one of those men who have good hearts and noble yearnings but look like anarchists or sewing-machine agents. Jack graduated high at Harvard. He went there when he was only eighteen. There’s no one’s had a better education or done better by it. His father may have been Irish and worked as shift boss on the Rey del Monte, but Jack’s quite different. He’s just as much of a gentleman as anybody in this country.”
Cornelia’s attitude on matters of genealogy was modern and Californian. Ireland was far behind her and Jack, as were also those great days in Nevada of which her mother and Bill Cannon spoke, as the returned Ulysses might have spoken of the ten years before Troy. She and Jack would eventually regard them as a period of unsophistication and social ferment which it were wisest to touch on lightly, and of which they would teach their children nothing.
“And then,” Cornelia went on, determined not to slight any detail of her fiance’s worthiness, “there’s never been anything fast or wild about Jack. He’s always been straight. There’s been no scandalous stories about him, as there have about Terence.”
“Never. Terence committed all the scandals for the family.”
“Well, Terence is in New York, thank Heaven!” said Cornelia with pious fervor, “and we won’t have to have anything to do with him or his wife either. Even if we go to Europe, we need only stay there a few days.”
The irregular career of Terence had been a thorn in the side of the respectable Duffys, he, some years earlier, having married his mistress, a chorus girl in a local theater, and attempted to force her upon the exclusive circles in which his people moved. It was not the least galling feature of Terence’s unconventional course that, having doubled his fortune by successful speculations, he had removed to New York where, after several spirited assaults and vigorous rebuffs, his wife had reached social heights toward which other Californians of spotless record and irreproachable character had clambered in vain.