hospitality finished the acquaintance. Jeff came, and he behaved
with as great indifference to the kindness meant him as if he were
dining out every night; he excused himself very early in the evening
on the ground that he had to go into Boston, and he never paid his
dinner-call. After that Westover tried to consider his whole duty to him
fulfilled, and not to trouble himself further. Now and then, however,
Jeff disappointed the expectation Westover had formed of him, by coming
to see him, and being apparently glad of the privilege. But he did not
make the painter think that he was growing in grace or wisdom, though he
apparently felt an increasing confidence in his own knowledge of life.

Westover could only feel a painful interest tinged with amusement in
his grotesque misconceptions of the world where he had not yet begun to
right himself. Jeff believed lurid things of the society wholly unknown
to him; to his gross credulity, Boston houses, which at the worst were
the homes of a stiff and cold exclusiveness, were the scenes of riot
only less scandalous than the dissipation to which fashionable ladies
abandoned themselves at champagne suppers in the Back Bay hotels and on
their secret visits to the Chinese opium-joints in Kingston Street.

Westover tried to make him see how impossible his fallacies were; but
he could perceive that Jeff thought him either wilfully ignorant or
helplessly innocent, and of far less authority than a barber who had the
entree of all these swell families as hair-dresser, and who corroborated
the witness of a hotel night-clerk (Jeff would not give their names)
to the depravity of the upper classes. He had to content himself with
saying: "I hope you will be ashamed some day of having believed such
rot. But I suppose it's something you've got to go through. You may take
my word for it, though? that it isn't going to do you any good. It's
going to do you harm, and that's why I hate to have you think it, for
your own sake. It can't hurt any one else."

What disgusted the painter most was that, with all his belief in
the wickedness of the fine world, it was clear that Jeff would
have willingly been of it; and he divined that if he had any strong
aspirations they were for society and for social acceptance. He had
fancied, when the fellow seemed to care so little for the studies of the
university, that he might come forward in its sports. Jeff gave more and
more the effect of tremendous strength