hauteur and whipped away to
her rooms, hers no longer, to make her preparations. She knew at least
how to give her going the effect of quitting the place with disdain and
abhorrence.

The incident of her expulsion was brutal, but it was clearly meant to be
so. It made Westover a little sick, and he would have liked to pity Mrs.
Marven more than he could. The ladies said that Mrs. Durgin's behavior
was an outrage, and they ought all to resent it by going straight to
their own rooms and packing their things and leaving on the same stage
with Mrs. Marven. None of them did so, and their talk veered around to
something extenuating, if not justifying, Mrs. Durgin's action.

"I suppose," one of them said, "that she felt more indignant about it
because she has been so very good to Mrs. Marven, and her daughter, too.
They were both sick on her hands here for a week after they came, first
one and then the other, and she looked after them and did for them like
a mother."

"And yet," another lady suggested, "what could Mrs. Marven have done?
What did she do? He wasn't asked to the picnic, and I don't see why he
should have been treated as a guest. He was there, purely and simply, to
bring the things and take them away. And, besides, if there is anything
in distinctions, in differences, if we are to choose who is to associate
with us--or our daughters--"

"That is true," the ladies said, in one form or another, with the tone
of conviction; but they were not so deeply convinced that they did not
want a man's opinion, and they all looked at Westover.

He would not respond to their look, and the lady who had argued for Mrs.
Marven had to ask: "What do you think, Mr. Westover?"

"Ah, it's a difficult question," he said. "I suppose that as long as one
person believes himself or herself socially better than another, it must
always be a fresh problem what to do in every given case."

The ladies said they supposed so, and they were forced to make what
they could of wisdom in which they might certainly have felt a want of
finality.

Westover went away from them in a perplexed mind which was not
simplified by the contempt he had at the bottom of all for something
unmanly in Jeff, who had carried his grievance to his mother like a
slighted boy, and provoked her to take up arms for him.

The sympathy for Mrs. Marven mounted again when it was seen that she did
not come to dinner, or permit her daughter to do so, and when it became
kno