But they gloried in their shame.

If you tactfully pretended not to see them, Helen shouted at you.

She made you feel you had been caught doing something indelicate and underhand.
The mothers of Fair Harbor were rather slow in accepting young Latimer.

So many of their sons had seen Helen shake her head in that inarticulate, worried way, and look so sorry for them, that any strange young man who apparently succeeded where those who had been her friends for years had learned they must remain friends, could not hope to escape criticism.

Besides, they did not know him: he did not come from Boston and Harvard, but from a Western city.