“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 into the studio after these delicate ladies, the robust Jeff Durgin wore a long frockcoat, with a flower in his button-hole, and in his left hand he carried a silk hat turned over his forearm as he must have noticed people whom he thought stylish carrying their hats.  He had on dark-gray trousers and sharp-pointed enamelled-leather shoes; and Westover grotesquely reflected that he was dressed, as he stood, to lead Genevieve Vostrand to the altar.

Westover saw at once that when he made his studio tea for the Vostrands he must ask Jeff; it would be cruel, and for several reasons impossible, not to do so, and he really did not see why he should not.  Mrs. Vostrand was taking him on the right ground, as a Harvard student, and nobody need take him on any other.  Possibly people would ask him to teas at their own houses, from Westover’s studio, but he could not feel that he was concerned in that.  Society is interested in a man’s future, not his past, as it is interested in a woman’s past, not her future.

But when he gave his tea it went off wonderfully well in every way, perhaps because it was one of the first teas of the fall.  It brought people together in their autumnal freshness before the winter had begun to wither their resolutions to be amiable to one another, to dull their wits, to stale their stories, or to give so wide a currency to their sayings that they could not freely risk them with every one.

Westover had thought it best to be frank with the leading lady of his class, when she said she should be delighted to receive for him, and would provide suitable young ladies to pour:  a brunette for the tea, and a blonde for the chocolate.  She took his scrupulosity very lightly when he spoke of Mrs. Vostrand’s educational sojourn in Europe; she laughed and said she knew the type, and the situation was one of the most obvious phases of the American marriage.