“The better you understand it, mother, the less you’ll like it; and I guess Cynthy sees it in the right light already.  What did she say?”

“Nothing.  She said she’d leave it to you.”

“Well, that’s like Cynthy.  I’ll tell you, then,” said Jeff; and he told his mother his whole affair with Bessie Lynde.  He had to be very elemental, and he was aware, as he had never been before, of the difference between Bessie’s world and his mother’s world, in trying to make Bessie’s world conceivable to her.

He was patient in going over every obscure point, and illustrating from the characters and condition of different summer folks the facts of Bessie’s entourage.  It is doubtful, however, if he succeeded in conveying to his mother a clear and just notion of the purely chic nature of the girl.  In the end she seemed to conceive of her simply as a hussy, and so pronounced her, without limit or qualification, in spite of Jeff’s laughing attempt to palliate her behavior, and to inculpate himself.  She said she did not see what he had done that was so much out of the way.  That thing had led him on from the beginning; she had merely got her come-uppings, when all was said.  Mrs. Durgin believed Cynthia would look at it as she did, if she could have it put before her rightly.  Jeff shook his head with persistent misgiving.  His notion was that Cynthia saw the affair only too clearly, and that there was no new light to be thrown on it from her point of view.  Mrs. Durgin would not allow this; she was sure that she could bring Cynthia round; and she asked Jeff whether it was his getting that fellow drunk that she seemed to blame him for the most.  He answered that he thought that was pretty bad, but he did not believe that was the worst thing in Cynthia’s eyes.  He did not forbid his mother’s trying to do what she could with her, and he went away for a walk, and left the house to the two women.  Jombateeste was in the barn, which he preferred to the house, and Frank Whitwell had gone to church over at the Huddle.  As Jeff passed Whitwell’s cottage in setting out on his stroll he saw the philosopher through the window, seated with his legs on the table, his hat pushed back, and his spectacles fallen to the point of his nose, reading, and moving his lips as he read.

The forenoon sun was soft, but the air was cool.

There was still plenty of snow on the upper slopes of the hills, and there was a drift here and there in a corner of pasture wall in the valley; but the springtime green was beginning to hover over the wet places in the fields; the catkins silvered the golden tracery of the willow branches by the brook; there was a buzz of bees about them, and about the maples, blackened by the earlier flow of sap through the holes in the bark made by the woodpeckers’ bills.  Now and then the tremolo of a bluebird shook in the tender light and the keen air.  At one point in the road where the sun fell upon some young pines in a sheltered spot a balsamic odor exhaled from them.