The girl’s motherly care of all the household did not leave Westover out.  Buttons appeared on garments long used to shifty contrivances for getting on without them; buttonholes were restored to their proper limits; his overcoat pockets were searched for gloves, and the gloves put back with their finger-tips drawn close as the petals of a flower which had decided to shut and be a bud again.

He wondered how he could thank her for his share of the blessing that her passion for motherly care was to all the house.  It was pathetic, and he used sometimes to forecast her self-devotion with a tender indignation, which included a due sense of his own present demerit.  He was not reconciled to the sacrifice because it seemed the happiness, or at least the will, of the nature which made it.  All the same it seemed a waste, in its relation to the man she was to marry.

Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia sat by the lamp and sewed at night, or listened to the talk of the men.  If Westover read aloud, they whispered together from time to time about some matters remote from it, as women always do where there is reading.  It was quiet, but it was not dull for Westover, who found himself in no hurry to get back to town.

Sometimes he thought of the town with repulsion; its unrest, its vacuous, troubled life haunted him like a memory of sickness; but he supposed that when he should be quite well again all that would change, and be as it was before.  He interested himself, with the sort of shrewd ignorance of it that Cynthia showed in the questions she asked about it now and then when they chanced to be left alone together.  He fancied that she was trying to form some intelligible image of Jeff’s environment there, and was piecing together from his talk of it the impressions she had got from summer folks.  He did his best to help her, and to construct for her a veritable likeness of the world as far as he knew it.

A time came when he spoke frankly of Jeff in something they were saying, and she showed no such shrinking as he had expected she would; he reflected that she might have made stricter conditions with Mrs. Durgin than she expected to keep herself in mentioning him.  This might well have been necessary with the mother’s pride in her son, which knew no stop when it once began to indulge itself.  What struck Westover more than the girl’s self-possession when they talked of Jeff was a certain austerity in her with regard to him.  She seemed to hold herself tense against any praise of him, as if she should fail him somehow if she relaxed at all in his favor.

This, at least, was the rather mystifying impression which Westover got from her evident wish to criticise and understand exactly all that he reported, rather than to flatter herself from it.  Whatever her motive was, he was aware that through it all she permitted herself a closer and fuller trust of himself.  At times it was almost too implicit; he would have liked to deserve it better by laying open all that had been in his heart against Jeff.  But he forbore, of course, and he took refuge, as well as he could, in the respect by which she held herself at a reverent distance from him when he could not wholly respect himself.