aid Mrs. Vostrand, while Jeff was
following his up in the elevator. "He was so very kind to us the day
we arrived at Zion's Head; and I didn't know but he might be feeling a
little sensitive about coming over second-cabin in our ship; and--"

"How like you, Mrs. Vostrand!" cried Westover, and he was now distinctly
glad he had not tried to sneak out of doing something for her. "Your
kindness won't be worse wasted on Durgin than it was on me, in the old
days, when I supposed I had taken a second-cabin passage for the voyage
of life. There's a great deal of good in him; I don't mean to say he got
through his Freshman year without trouble with the college authorities,
but the Sophomore year generally brings wisdom."

"Oh," said Mrs. Vostrand, "they're always a little wild at first, I
suppose."

Later, the ladies brought Jeff with them when they came to Westover's
studio, and the painter perceived that they were very good friends, as
if they must have met several times since he had seen them together. He
interested himself in the growing correctness of Jeff's personal effect.
During his Freshman year, while the rigor of the unwritten Harvard law
yet forbade him a silk hat or a cane, he had kept something of the boy,
if not the country boy. Westover had noted that he had always rather
a taste for clothes, but in this first year he did not get beyond a
derby-hat and a sack-coat, varied toward the end by a cutaway. In the
outing dress he wore at home he was always effective, but there was
something in Jeff's figure which did not lend itself to more formal
fashion; something of herculean proportion which would have marked him
of a classic beauty perhaps if he had not been in clothes at all, or
of a yeomanly vigor and force if he had been clad for work, but which
seemed to threaten the more worldly conceptions of the tailor with
danger. It was as if he were about to burst out of his clothes, not
because he wore them tight, but because there was somehow more of the
man than the citizen in him; something native, primitive, something that
Westover could not find quite a word for, characterized him physically
and spiritually. When he came into the studio after these delicate
ladies, the robust Jeff Durgin wore a long frockcoat, with a flower in
his button-hole, and in his left hand he carried a silk hat turned
over his forearm as he must have noticed people whom he thought stylish
carrying their hats. He had on dark-gray trousers a