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 in his peculiar physique, though there was always
the disappointm