might be low and mean in them, instead of what
might be fine and high.

He was sensible of the growth Jeff had made intellectually. He had not
been at Harvard nearly four years for nothing. He had phrases and could
handle them. In whatever obscure or perverse fashion, he had profited by
his opportunities. The fellow who could accuse him of being an idealist,
and could in some sort prove it, was no longer a naughty boy to be
tutored and punished. The revolt latent in him would be violent in
proportion to the pressure put upon him, and Westover began to be
without the wish to press his fault home to him so strongly. In the
optimism generated by the punch, he felt that he might leave the case to
Jeff himself; or else in the comfort we all experience in sinking to a
lower level, he was unwilling to make the effort to keep his own moral
elevation. But he did make an effort to save himself by saying: "You
can't get what you've done before yourself as you can the action of some
one else. It's part of you, and you have to judge the motive as well as
the effect."

"Well, that's what I'm doing," said Jeff; "but it seems to me that
you're trying to have me judge of the effect from a motive I didn't
have. As far as I can make out, I hadn't any motive at all."

He laughed, and all that Westover could say was, "Then you're still
responsible for the result." But this no longer appeared so true to him.

XXXVIII.

It was not a condition of Westover's welcome at Lion's Head that he
should seem peculiarly the friend of Jeff Durgin, but he could not help
making it so, and he began to overact the part as soon as he met Jeff's
mother. He had to speak of him in thanking her for remembering his wish
to paint Lion's Head in the winter, and he had to tell her of Jeff's
thoughtfulness during the past fortnight; he had to say that he did not
believe he should ever have got away if it had not been for him. This
was true; Durgin had even come in from Cambridge to see him off on the
train; he behaved as if the incident with Lynde and all their talk about
it had cemented the friendship between Westover and himself, and he
could not be too devoted. It now came out that he had written home all
about Westover, and made his mother put up a stove in the painter's old
room, so that he should have the instant use of it when he arrived.

It was an air-tight wood-stove, and it filled the chamber with a heat in
which Westover drowsed as soon as he