men are not fit to
judge." His gay face darkened. "But tell 'em if you want to."

"Bah!" cried the painter. "Why should I want to I'm not a woman in
everything."

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Westover. I didn't mean that. I only meant that
you're an idealist. I look at this thing as if some one else had done it;
I believe that's the practical way; and I shouldn't go in for punishing
any one else for such a thing very severely." He made another punch--for
himself this time, he said; but Westover joined him in a glass of it.

"It won't do to take that view of your faults, Jeff," he said, gravely.

"What's the reason?" Jeff demanded; and now either the punch had begun to
work in Westover's brain, or some other influence of like force and
quality. He perceived that in this earth-bound temperament was the
potentiality of all the success it aimed at. The acceptance of the moral
fact as it was, without the unconscious effort to better it, or to hold
himself strictly to account for it, was the secret of the power in the
man which would bring about the material results he desired; and this
simplicity of the motive involved had its charm.

Westover was aware of liking Durgin at that moment much more than he
ought, and of liking him helplessly. In the light of his good-natured
selfishness, the injury to the Lyndes showed much less a sacrilege than
it had seemed; Westover began to see it with Jeff's eyes, and to see it
with reference to what might be low and mean in them, instead of what
might be fine and high.

He was sensible of the growth Jeff had made intellectually. He had not
been at Harvard nearly four years for nothing. He had phrases and could
handle them. In whatever obscure or perverse fashion, he had profited by
his opportunities. The fellow who could accuse him of being an idealist,
and could in some sort prove it, was no longer a naughty boy to be
tutored and punished. The revolt latent in him would be violent in
proportion to the pressure put upon him, and Westover began to be without
the wish to press his fault home to him so strongly. In the optimism
generated by the punch, he felt that he might leave the case to Jeff
himself; or else in the comfort we all experience in sinking to a lower
level, he was unwilling to make the effort to keep his own moral
elevation. But he did make an effort to save himself by saying: "You
can't get what you've done before yourself as you can the action of some
one else. It's part of