door, the card of Mr. Thomas Jefferson Durgin came up
to her from the reception-room. Her aunt had gone to bed, and she had a
luxurious moment in which she reaped all the reward of self-denial by
supposing herself to have foregone the pleasure of seeing him, and
sending down word that she was not at home. She did not wish, indeed, to
see him, but she wished to know how he felt warranted in calling in the
evening, and it was this unworthy, curiosity which she stifled for that
luxurious moment. The next, with undiminished dignity, she said, "Ask him
to come up, Andrew," and she waited in the library for him to offer a
justification of the liberty he had taken.

He offered none whatever, but behaved at once as if he had always had the
habit of calling in the evening, or as if it was a general custom which
he need not account for in his own case. He brought her a book which they
had talked of at their last meeting, but he made no excuse or pretext of
it.

He said it was a beautiful night, and that he had found it rather warm
walking in from Cambridge. The exercise had moistened his whole rich, red
color, and fine drops of perspiration stood on his clean-shaven upper lip
and in the hollow between his under lip and his bold chin; he pushed back
the coarse, dark-yellow hair from his forehead with his handkerchief, and
let his eyes mock her from under his thick, straw-colored eyebrows. She
knew that he was enjoying his own impudence, and he was so handsome that
she could not refuse to enjoy it with him. She asked him if he would not
have a fan, and he allowed her to get it for him from the mantel. "Will
you have some tea?"

"No; but a glass of water, if you please," he said, and Bessie rang and
sent for some apollinaris, which Jeff drank a great goblet of when it
came. Then he lay back in the deep chair he had taken, with the air of
being ready for any little amusing thing she had to say.

"Are you still a pessimist, Mr. Durgin?" she asked, tentatively, with the
effect of innocence that he knew meant mischief.

"No," he said. "I'm a reformed optimist."

"What is that?"

"It's a man who can't believe all the good he would like, but likes to
believe all the good he can."

Bessie said it over, with burlesque thoughtfulness. "There was a girl
here to-day," she said, solemnly, "who must have been a reformed
pessimist, then, for she said the same thing."

"Oh! Miss Enderby," said Jeff.

Bessie started. "You're preternatur