“What kind of folks are they?”

“What kind?  Really!  Why, they’re very charming people—­”

“So Jeff seems to think.  Any call to show them any particular attention?”

“I don’t know if I quite understand—­”

“Why, it’s just this.  Jeff, here, wants to make a picnic for them, or something, and I can’t see the sense of it.  You remember what happened at that other picnic, with that Mrs. Marven”—­Jeff tapped the floor with his stick impatiently, and Westover felt sorry for him—­“and I don’t want it to happen again, and I’ve told Jeff so.  I presume he thinks it ’ll set him right with them, if they’re thinkin’ demeaning of him because he came over second-cabin on their ship.”

Jeff set his teeth and compressed his lips to bear as best he could, the give-away which his mother could not appreciate in its importance to him: 

“They’re not the kind of people to take such a thing shabbily,” said Westover.  “They didn’t happen to mention it, but Mrs. Vostrand must have got used to seeing young fellows in straits of all kinds during her life abroad.  I know that I sometimes made the cup of tea and biscuit she used to give me in Florence do duty for a dinner, and I believe she knew it.”

Jeff looked up at Westover with a grateful, sidelong glance.

His mother said:  “Well, then, that’s all right, and Jeff needn’t do anything for them on that account.  And I’ve made up my mind about one thing:  whatever the hotel does has got to be done for the whole hotel.  It can’t pick and choose amongst the guests.”  Westover liked so little the part of old family friend which he seemed, whether he liked it or not, to bear with the Durgins, that he would gladly have got away now, but Mrs. Durgin detained him with a direct appeal.  “Don’t you think so, Mr. Westover?”

Jeff spared him the pain of a response.  “Very well,” he said to his mother; “I’m not the hotel, and you never want me to be.  I can do this on my own account.”

“Not with my coach and not with my hosses,” said his mother.

Jeff rose.  “I might as well go on down to Cambridge, and get to work on my conditions.”

“Just as you please about that,” said Mrs. Durgin, with the same impassioned quiet that showed in her son’s handsome face and made it one angry red to his yellow hair.  “We’ve got along without you so far, this summer, and I guess we can the rest of the time.  And the sooner you work off your conditions the better, I presume.”

The next morning Jeff came to take leave of him, where Westover had pitched his easel and camp-stool on the slope behind the hotel.

“Why, are you really going?” he asked.  “I was in hopes it might have blown over.”

“No, things don’t blow over so easy with mother,” said Jeff, with an embarrassed laugh, but no resentment.  “She generally means what she says.”

“Well, in this case, Jeff, I think she was right.”