with a certain imaginative lift in his thinking and
feeling, Whitwell was irreparably rustic, that he was and always must
be practically Yankee. Westover was not a Yankee, and he did not love or
honor the type, though its struggles against itself touched and amused
him. It made him a little sick to hear how Whitwell had profited by
Durgin's necessity, and had taken advantage of him with conscientious
and self-applausive rapacity, while he admired his prosperity, and tried
to account for it by doubt of its injustice. For a moment this seemed
to him worse than Durgin's conscientious toughness, which was the
antithesis of Whitwell's remorseless self-interest. For the moment this
claimed Cynthia of its kind, and Westover beheld her rustic and Yankee
of her father's type. If she was not that now, she would grow into
that through the lapse from the personal to the ancestral which we all
undergo in the process of the years.

The sight of her face as he had pictured it, and of the soul which he
had imagined for it, restored him to a better sense of her, but he felt
the need of escaping from the suggestion of her father's presence, and
taking further thought. Perhaps he should never again reach the point
that he was aware of deflecting from now; he filled his lungs with
long breaths, which he exhaled in sighs of relief. It might have been a
mistake on the spiritual as well as the worldly side; it would certainly
not have promoted his career; it might have impeded it. These misgivings
flitted over the surface of thought that more profoundly was occupied
with a question of other things. In the time since he had seen her last
it might very well be that a young and pretty girl had met some one who
had taken her fancy; and he could not be sure that her fancy had ever
been his, even if this had not happened. He had no proof at all that she
had ever cared or could care for him except gratefully, respectfully,
almost reverentially, with that mingling of filial and maternal anxiety
which had hitherto been the warmest expression of her regard. He tried
to reason it out, and could not. He suddenly found himself bitterly
disappointed that he had missed seeing her, for if they had met, he
would have known by this time what to think, what to hope. He felt
old--he felt fully thirty-six years old--as he passed his hand over his
crown, whose gossamer growth opposed so little resistance to his touch.
He had begun to lose his hair early, but till t