At twenty-eight Winona was not only perfected in the grammar of morals, more than ever alert for infractions of the merely social code, but her ideals of refinement and elegance had become more demanding.

She would have had the boy engage in a pursuit that would require clean hands and smart apparel and bring him in contact with people of the right sort.

She stubbornly held out to him the shining possibility that he might one day rise to the pinnacle of a clerical post in the First National Bank.
True, he had never betrayed the faintest promise of qualifying for this eminence, and his freely voiced preferences sweepingly excluded it from the catalogue of occupations in which he might consent to engage.

But Winona was now studying doctrines that put all power in the heart's desire.

Out of the infinite your own would come to you if you held the thought, and she serenely held the better thought for Wilbur, even in the moment of mechanical triumphs that brimmed his own cup of desire.
She willed him to prefer choicer characters than the roughs he consorted with, to aspire to genteel occupation that would not send him back at the day's end grimed, reeking with low odours, and far too hungry.
His exigent appetite, indeed, alarmed her beyond measure, because he cried out for meat, whereas Winona's new books said that meat eaters could hope for little reward of the spirit.