She was thinking fixedly about Jason Burrage, and the great impending change in her condition, not in its worldly implications--she thought mostly of material values in the spirit of her admonitions to Rhoda--but in its personal and inner force. At times a pale question of her aptitude for marriage disturbed her serenity; at times she saw it as a sacrifice of her being to a condition commanded of God, a species of martyrdom even. The nine years of Jason's absence had fixed certain maidenly habits of privacy; the mold of her life had taken a definite cast. Her existence had its routine, the recurrence of Sunday, its contemplations, duties, and heavenly aim. And, lately, Jason's letters had disturbed her. They seemed filled with an almost wicked pride and a disconcerting energy; he spoke of things instinctively distressing to her; there were hints of rude, Godless force and gaiety--allusions to the Jenny Lind Theatre, the El Dorado, which she apprehended as a name of evil import, and to the excursions they would make to Boston or as far as New York. Jason, too, she realized, must have developed; and California, she feared, might have emphasized exactly such traits as she would wish suppressed. The power of self-destruction in the human heart she believed immeasurable. All, all, must throw themselves in abject humility upward upon the Rock of Salvation. And she could find nothing humble in Jason's periods, burdened as they were with a patent satisfaction in the success of his venture. Yet parallel with this was a gladness that he had triumphed, and that he was coming back to Cottarsport a figure of importance. She could measure that by the attitude of their town, by the number and standing of the people who cordially stopped her on the street for the purposes of congratulation and curiosity. Every one, of course, had known of their engagement; there had been a marked interest when Jason and a fellow townsman, Thomas Gast, had departed; but that would be insignificant compared to the permanent bulk Jason must now assume. Why he and the Canderays would be Cottarsport's most considerable people. As always, at the merest thought of the Canderays, personal facts were suspended for a mental glance at that separate family. There was no sense of inferiority in Olive's mind, but an instinctive feeling of difference. This wasn't the result of their big house, nor because the Captain's wife had been a member of Boston society, but resided in the contrariness of the family itself, now centered in Honora, the only one alive.