ken effort to avert the millennium which the book in
question seemed to threaten. The lady who matronized the tea was said
to have done more good than you could imagine at the North End, and she
caught at the chance to meet the college jays in a spirit of Christian
charity. When the man who was going to give the tea rather sheepishly
confessed what the altruistic man had got him in for, she praised him
so much that he went away feeling like the hero of a holy cause. She
promised the assistance and sympathy of several brave girls, who would
not be afraid of all the jays in college.

After all, only one of the jays came. Not many, in fact, had been asked,
and when Jeff Durgin actually appeared, it was not known that he was
both the first and the last of his kind. The lady who was matronizing
the tea recognized him, with a throe of her quickened conscience, as the
young fellow whom she had met two winters before at the studio tea which
Mr. Westover had given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and
whom she had never thought of since, though she had then promised
herself to do something for him. She had then even given him some
vague hints of a prospective hospitality, and she confessed her sin of
omission in a swift but graphic retrospect to one of her brave girls,
while Jeff stood blocking out a space for his stalwart bulk amid the
alien elegance just within the doorway, and the host was making his way
toward him, with an outstretched hand of hardy welcome.

At an earlier period of his neglect and exclusion, Jeff would not have
responded to the belated overture which had now been made him, for no
reason that he could divine. But he had nothing to lose by accepting
the invitation, and he had promised the altruistic man, whom he rather
liked; he did not dislike the giver of the tea so much as some other
men, and so he came.

The brave girl whom the matron was preparing to devote to him stood
shrinking with a trepidation which she could not conceal at sight of
his strange massiveness, with his rust-gold hair coming down toward his
thick yellow brows and mocking blue eyes in a dense bang, and his jaw
squaring itself under the rather insolent smile of his full mouth. The
matron felt that her victim teas perhaps going to fail her, when a voice
at her ear said, as if the question were extorted, "Who in the world is
that?"

She instantly turned, and flashed out in a few inspired syllables
the fact she had just imparted