He found himself drawing a very deep and long breath before he began to mount the many stairs to his studio, and wishing either that Mrs. Vostrand had not decided to spend the winter in Boston, or else that he were of a slacker conscience and could wear his gratitude more lightly.  But there was some relief in thinking that he could do nothing for a month yet.  He gained a degree of courage by telling the ladies, when he went to find them in their new apartment, that he should want them to meet a few of his friends at tea as soon as people began to get back to town; and he made the most of their instant joy in accepting his invitation.

His pleasure was somehow dashed a little, before he left them, by the announcement of Jeff Durgin’s name.

“I felt bound to send him my card,” said Mrs. Vostrand, while Jeff was following his up in the elevator.  “He was so very kind to us the day we arrived at Zion’s Head; and I didn’t know but he might be feeling a little sensitive about coming over second-cabin in our ship; and—­”

“How like you, Mrs. Vostrand!” cried Westover, and he was now distinctly glad he had not tried to sneak out of doing something for her.  “Your kindness won’t be worse wasted on Durgin than it was on me, in the old days, when I supposed I had taken a second-cabin passage for the voyage of life.  There’s a great deal of good in him; I don’t mean to say he got through his Freshman year without trouble with the college authorities, but the Sophomore year generally brings wisdom.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Vostrand, “they’re always a little wild at first, I suppose.”

Later, the ladies brought Jeff with them when they came to Westover’s studio, and the painter perceived that they were very good friends, as if they must have met several times since he had seen them together.  He interested himself in the growing correctness of Jeff’s personal effect.  During his Freshman year, while the rigor of the unwritten Harvard law yet forbade him a silk hat or a cane, he had kept something of the boy, if not the country boy.  Westover had noted that he had always rather a taste for clothes, but in this first year he did not get beyond a derby-hat and a sack-coat, varied toward the end by a cutaway.  In the outing dress he wore at home he was always effective, but there was something in Jeff’s figure which did not lend itself to more formal fashion; something of herculean proportion which would have marked him of a classic beauty perhaps if he had not been in clothes at all, or of a yeomanly vigor and force if he had been clad for work, but which seemed to threaten the more worldly conceptions of the tailor with danger.  It was as if he were about to burst out of his clothes, not because he wore them tight, but because there was somehow more of the man than the citizen in him; something native, primitive, something that Westover could not find quite a word for, characterized him physically and spiritually.  When he came