Whitwell seemed pleased that these things should have caught Westover’s eye.  He said, almost immediately:  “Lookin’ at my almanac?  This is one of our field-days; we have ’em once a week; and I like to let the ladies see beforehand what nature’s got on the bill for ’em, in the woods and pastur’s.”

“It’s a good idea,” said Westover, “and it’s fresh and picturesque.”  Whitwell laughed for pleasure.

“They told me what a consolation you were to the ladies, with your walks and talks.”

“Well, I try to give ’em something to think about,” said Whitwell.

“But why do you confine your ministrations to one sex?”

“I don’t, on purpose.  But it’s the only sex here, three-fourths of the time.  Even the children are mostly all girls.  When the husbands come up Saturday nights, they don’t want to go on a tramp Sundays.  They want to lay off and rest.  That’s about how it is.  Well, you see some changes about Lion’s Head, I presume?” he asked, with what seemed an impersonal pleasure in them.

“I should rather have found the old farm.  But I must say I’m glad to find such a good hotel.”

“Jeff and his mother made their brags to you?” said Whitwell, with a kind of amiable scorn.  “I guess if it wa’n’t for Cynthy she wouldn’t know where she was standin’, half the time.  It don’t matter where Jeff stands, I guess.  Jackson’s the best o’ the lot, now the old man’s gone.”  There was no one by at the moment to hear these injuries except Westover, but Whitwell called them out with a frankness which was perhaps more carefully adapted to the situation than it seemed.  Westover made no attempt to parry them formally; but he offered some generalities in extenuation of the unworthiness of the Durgins, which Whitwell did not altogether refuse.

“Oh, it’s all right.  Old woman talk to you about Jeff’s going to college?  I thought so.  Wants to make another Dan’el Webster of him.  Guess she can’s far forth as Dan’el’s graduatin’ went.”  Westover tried to remember how this had been with the statesman, but could not.  Whitwell added, with intensifying irony so of look and tone:  “Guess the second Dan’el won’t have a chance to tear his degree up; guess he wouldn’t ever b’en ready to try for it if it had depended on him.  They don’t keep any record at Harvard, do they, of the way fellows are prepared for their preliminary examinations?”

“I don’t quite know what you mean,” said Westover.

“Oh, nothin’.  You get a chance some time to ask Jeff who done most of his studyin’ for him at the Academy.”

This hint was not so darkling but Westover could understand that Whitwell attributed Jeff’s scholarship to the help of Cynthia, but he would not press him to an open assertion of the fact.  There was something painful in it to him; it had the pathos which perhaps most of the success in the world would reveal if we could penetrate its outside.

He was silent, and Whitwell left the point.  “Well,” he concluded, “what’s goin’ on in them old European countries?”