So far Jeff seemed to have spent very few of his evenings in Cambridge, and Westover thought it would be well if he had some acquaintance there.  He made favor for him with a friendly family, who asked him to dinner.  They did it to oblige Westover, against their own judgment and knowledge, for they said it was always the same with Freshmen; a single act of hospitality finished the acquaintance.  Jeff came, and he behaved 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 disappointment of not finding him tall.  He was of the middle height, but he was hewn out and squared upward massively.