mselves-amateurs, I guess--and first and
last they all want to see it. I guess they'll all want to see you, Mr.
Westover. They'll be wild, as they call it, when they know you're in the
house. Yes, I mean Jeff shall go to college."

"Bowdoin or Dartmouth?" Westover suggested.

"Well, I guess you'll think I'm about as forth-putting as I was when
I wanted you to give me a three-hundred-dollar picture for a week's
board."

"I only got a hundred and sixty, Mrs. Durgin," said Westover,
conscientiously.

"Well, it's a shame. Any rate, three hundred's the price to all my
boarders. My, if I've told that story once, I guess I've told it fifty
times!"

Mrs. Durgin laughed at herself jollily, and Westover noted how
prosperity had changed her. It had freed her tongue, it has brightened
her humor, it had cheered her heart; she had put on flesh, and her
stalwart frame was now a far greater bulk than he remembered.

"Well, there," she said, "the long and the short of it is, I want Jeff
should go to Harvard."

He commanded himself to say: "I don't see why he shouldn't."

Mrs. Durgin called out, "Come in, Jackson," and Westover looked round
and saw the elder son like a gaunt shadow in the doorway. "I've just got
where I've told Mr. Westover where I want Jeff should go. It don't seem
to have ca'd him off his feet any, either."

"I presume," said Jackson, coming in and sitting lankly down in the
feather-cushioned rocking-chair which his mother pushed toward him with
her foot, "that the expense would be more at Harvard than it would at
the other colleges."

"If you want the best you got to pay for it," said Mrs. Durgin.

"I suppose it would cost more," Westover answered Jackson's conjecture.
"I really don't know much about it. One hears tremendous stories at
Boston of the rate of living among the swell students in Cambridge.
People talk of five thousand a year, and that sort of thing." Mrs.
Durgin shut her lips, after catching her breath. "But I fancy that
it's largely talk. I have a friend whose son went through Harvard for a
thousand a year, and I know that many fellows do it for much less."

"I guess we can manage to let Jeff have a thousand a year," said Mrs.
Durgin, proudly, "and not scrimp very much, either."

She looked at her elder son, who said: "I don't believe but what we
could. It's more of a question with me what sort of influence Jeff would
come under there. I think he's pretty much spoiled here."

"Now, Jack