ly. The
thought of Cynthia had always intruded more or less effectively between
them, but now that this thought began to fade into the past, the thought
of Bessie began to grow out of it with no interposing shadow.

However, Jeff was in no hurry. It was not passion that moved him, and
the mood in which he could play with the notion of getting back to his
flirtation with Bessie Lynde was pleasanter after the violence of recent
events than any renewal of strong sensations could be. He preferred to
loiter in this mood, and he was meantime much more comfortable than
he had been for a great while. He was rid of the disagreeable sense of
disloyalty to Cynthia, and he was rid of the stress of living up to her
conscience in various ways. He was rid of Bessie Lynde, too, and of the
trouble of forecasting and discounting her caprices. His thought turned
at times with a soft regret to hopes, disappointments, experiences
connected with neither, and now tinged with a tender melancholy,
unalloyed by shame or remorse. As he drew nearer to Class Day he had a
somewhat keener compunction for Cynthia and the hopes he had encouraged
her to build and had then dashed. But he was coming more and more to
regard it all as fatality; and if the chance that he counted upon to
bring him and Bessie together again had occurred he could have more
easily forgiven himself.

One of the jays, who was spreading on rather a large scale, wanted Jeff
to spread with him, but he refused, because, as he said, he meant to
keep out of it altogether; and for the same reason he declined to take
part in the spread of a rather jay society he belonged to. In his secret
heart he trusted that some friendly fortuity might throw an invitation
to Beck Hall in his way, or at least a card for the Gym, which, if no
longer the place it had been, was still by no means jay. He got neither;
but as he felt all the joy of the June day in his young blood he
consoled himself very well with the dancing at one of the halls, where
the company happened that year to be openly, almost recklessly jay. Jeff
had some distinction among the fellows who enviously knew of his social
success during the winter, and especially of his affair with Bessie
Lynde; and there were some girls very pretty and very well dressed among
the crowd of girls who were neither. They were from remote parts of the
country, and in the charge of chaperons ignorant of the differences so
poignant to local society. Jeff wen