Jeff's place at Harvard had been too long fixed among the jays to allow
the hope of wholly retrieving his condition now. It was too late for him
to be chosen in any of the nicer clubs or societies, but he was not
beyond the mounting sentiment of comradery, which begins to tell in the
last year among college men, and which had its due effect with his class.
One of the men, who had always had a foible for humanity, took advantage
of the prevailing mood in another man, and wrought upon him to ask, among
the fellows he was asking to a tea at his rooms, several fellows who were
distinctly and almost typically jay. The tea was for the aunt of the man
who gave it, a very pretty woman from New York, and it was so richly
qualified by young people of fashion from Boston that the infusion of the
jay flavor could not spoil it, if it would not rather add an agreeable
piquancy. This college mood coincided that year with a benevolent emotion
in the larger world, from which fashion was not exempt. Society had just
been stirred by the reading of a certain book, which had then a very
great vogue, and several people had been down among the wretched at the
North End doing good in a conscience-stricken 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 to her treacherous heroine. "Do let me
introduce him, Miss Lynde. I must do something for him, when he gets up
to me, if he ever does."
"By all means," said the girl, who had an impulse to laugh at the rude
force of Jeff's face and figure, so disproportioned to the occasion, and
she vented it at the matron's tribulation. The matron was shaking hands
with people right and left, and exchanging inaudible banalities with
them. She did not know what the girl said in answer, but she was aware
that she remained near her. She had professed her joy at seeing Jeff
again, when he reached her, and she turned with him and said, "Let me
present you to Miss Lynde, Mr. Durgin," and so abandoned them to each
other.
As Jeff had none of the anxiety for social success which he would have
felt at an earlier period, he now left it to Miss Lynde to begin the
talk, or not, as she chose. He bore himself with so much indifference
that she was piqued to an effort to hold his eyes, that wandered from her
to this face and that in the crowd.
"Do you find many people you know, Mr. Durgin?"
"I don't find any."
"I supposed you didn't from the way you looked at them."
"How did I look at them?"
"As if you wanted to eat them, and one never wants to eat one's friends."
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. They wouldn't agree with one."
Jeff laughed, and he now took fuller note of the slender girl who stood
before him, and swayed a little backward, in a graceful curve. He saw
that she had a dull, thick complexion, with liquid eyes, set wide apart
and slanted upward slightly, and a nose that was deflected inward from
the straight line; but her mouth was beautiful and vividly red like a
crimson blossom.
"Couldn't you find me some place to sit down, Mr. Durgin?" she asked.
He had it on his tongue to say, "Well, not unless you want to sit down on
some enemy," but he did not venture this: when it comes to daring of that
sort, the boldest man is commonly a little behind a timid woman.
Several of the fellows had clubbed their rooms, and lent them to the man
who was giving the tea; he used one of the apartments for a cloak-room,
and he meant the other for the social overflow from his own. But people
always prefer to remain dammed-up together in the room where they are
received, and Miss Lynde looked between the neighboring heads, and over
the neighboring shoulders, and saw the borrowed apartment quite empty. At
the moment of this discovery the host came fighting his way up to make
sure that Jeff had been provided for in the way of introductions. He
promptly introduced him to Miss Lynde. She said: "Oh, that's been done!
Can't you think of something new?" Jeff liked the style of this. "I don't
mind it, but I'm afraid Mr. Durgin must find it monotonous."
"Oh, well, do something original yourself, then, Miss Lynde!" said the
host. "Start a movement for that room across the passage; that's mine,
too, for the occasion; and save some of these people's lives. It's
suffocating in here."
"I don't mind saving Mr. Durgin's," said the girl, "if he wants it
saved."
"Oh, I know he's just dying to have you save it," said the host, and he
left them, to inspire other people to follow their example. But such as
glanced across the passage into the overflow room seemed to think it now
the possession solely of the pioneers of the movement. At any rate, they
made no show of joining them; and after Miss Lynde and Jeff had looked at
the pictures on the walls and the photographs on the mantel of the room
where they found themselves, they sat down on chairs fronting the open
door and the door of the room they had left. The window-seat would have
been more to Jeff's mind, and he had proposed it, but the girl seemed not
to have heard him; she took the deep easy-chair in full view of the
company opposite, and left him to pull up a chair beside her.
"I always like to see the pictures in a man's room," she said, with a
little sigh of relief from their inspection and a partial yielding of her
figure to the luxury of the chair. "Then I know what the man is. This
man--I don't know whose room it is--seems to have spent a good deal of
his time at the theatre."
"Isn't that where most of them spend their time?" asked Jeff.
"I'm sure I don't know. Is that where you spend yours?"
"It used to be. I'm not spending my time anywhere just now." She looked
questioningly, and he added, "I haven't got any to spend."
"Oh, indeed! Is that a reason? Why don't you spend somebody else's?"
"Nobody has any, that I know."
"You're all working off conditions, you mean?"
"That's what I'm doing, or trying to."
"Then it's never certain whether you can do it, after all?"
"Not so certain as to be free from excitement," said Jeff, smiling.
"And are you consumed with the melancholy that seems to be balling up all
the men at the prospect of having to leave Harvard and go out into the
hard, cold world?"
"I don't look it, do I? Jeff asked:
"No, you don't. And you don't feel it? You're not trying concealment, and
so forth?"
"No; if I'd had my own way, I'd have left Harvard before this." He could
see that his bold assumption of difference, or indifference, told upon
her. "I couldn't get out into the hard, cold world too soon."
"How fearless! Most of them don't know what they're going to do in it."
"I do."
"And what are you going to do? Or perhaps you think that's asking!"
"Oh no. I'm going to keep a hotel."
He had hoped to startle her, but she asked, rather quietly, "What do you
mean?" and she added, as if to punish him for trying to mystify her:
"I've heard that it requires gifts for that. Isn't there some proverb?"
"Yes. But I'm going to try to do it on experience." He laughed, and he
did not mind her trying to hit him, for he saw that he had made her
curious.
"Do you mean that you have kept a hotel?"
"For three generations," he returned, with a gravity that mocked her from
his bold eyes.
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," she said, indifferently. "Where is
your hotel? In Boston--New York--Chicago?"
"It's in the country--it's a summer hotel," he said, as before.
She looked away from him toward the other room. "There's my brother. I
didn't know he was coming."
"Shall I go and tell him where you are?" Jeff asked, following the
direction of her eyes.
"No, no; he can find me," said the girl, sinking back in her chair again.
He left her to resume the talk where she chose, and she said: "If it's
something ancestral, of course--"
"I don't know as it's that, exactly. My grandfather used to keep a
country tavern, and so it's in the blood, but the hotel I mean is
something that we've worked up into from a farm boarding-house."
"You don't talk like a country person," the girl broke in, abruptly.
"Not in Cambridge. I do in the country."
"And so," she prompted, "you're going to turn it into a hotel when you've
got out of Harvard."
"It's a hotel already, and a pretty big one; but I'm going to make the
right kind of hotel of it when I take hold of it."
"And what is the right kind of a hotel?"
"That's a long story. It would make you tired."
"It might, but we've got to spend the time somehow. You could begin, and
then if I couldn't stand it you could stop."
"It's easier to stop first and begin some other time. I guess I'll let
you imagine my hotel, Miss Lynde."
"Oh, I understand now," said the girl. "The table will be the great
thing. You will stuff people."
"Do you mean that I'm trying to stuff you?"
"How do I know? You never can tell what men really mean."
Jeff laughed with mounting pleasure in her audacity, that imparted a
sense of tolerance for him such as he had experienced very seldom from
the Boston girls he had met; after all, he had met but few. It flattered
him to have her doubt what he had told her in his reckless indifference;
it implied that he was fit for better things than hotel-keeping.
"You never can tell how much a woman believes," he retorted.
"And you keep trying to find out?"
"No, but I think that they might believe the truth."
"You'd better try them with it!"
"Well, I will. Do you really want to know what I'm going to do when I get
through?"
"Let me see!" Miss Lynde leaned forward, with her elbow on her knee and
her chin in her hand, and softly kicked the edge of her skirt with the
toe of her shoe, as if in deep thought. Jeff waited for her to play her
comedy through. "Yes," she said, "I think I did wish to know--at one
time."
"But you don't now?"
"Now? How can I tell? It was a great while ago!"
"I see you don't."
Miss Lynde did not make any reply. She asked, "Do you know my aunt,
Durgin?"
"I didn't know you had one."
"Yes, everybody has an aunt--even when they haven't a mother, if you can
believe the Gilbert operas. I ask because I happen to live with my aunt,
and if you knew her she might--ask you to call." Miss Lynde scanned
Jeff's face for the effect of this.
He said, gravely: "If you'll introduce me to her, I'll ask her to let
me."
"Would you, really?" said the girl. "I've half a mind to try. I wonder if
you'd really have the courage."
"I don't think I'm easily rattled."
"You mean that I'm trying to rattle you."
"No--"
"I'm not. My aunt is just what I've said."
"You haven't said what she was. Is she here?"
"No; that's the worst of it. If she were, I should introduce you, just to
see if you'd dare. Well, some other time I will."
"You think there'll be some other time?" Jeff asked.
"I don't know. There are all kinds of times. By-the-way, what time is
it?"