He was patient in going over every obscure point, and illustrating from
the characters and condition of different summer folks the facts of
Bessie's entourage. It is doubtful, however, if he succeeded in conveying
to his mother a clear and just notion of the purely chic nature of the
girl. In the end she seemed to conceive of her simply as a hussy, and so
pronounced her, without limit or qualification, in spite of Jeff's
laughing attempt to palliate her behavior, and to inculpate himself. She
said she did not see what he had done that was so much out of the way.
That thing had led him on from the beginning; she had merely got her
come-uppings, when all was said. Mrs. Durgin believed Cynthia would look
at it as she did, if she could have it put before her rightly. Jeff shook
his head with persistent misgiving. His notion was that Cynthia saw the
affair only too clearly, and that there was no new light to be thrown on
it from her point of view. Mrs. Durgin would not allow this; she was sure
that she could bring Cynthia round; and she asked Jeff whether it was his
getting that fellow drunk that she seemed to blame him for the most. He
answered that he thought that was pretty bad, but he did not believe that
was the worst thing in Cynthia's eyes. He did not forbid his mother's
trying to do what she could with her, and he went away for a walk, and
left the house to the two women. Jombateeste was in the barn, which he
preferred to the house, and Frank Whitwell had gone to church over at the
Huddle. As Jeff passed Whitwell's cottage in setting out on his stroll he
saw the philosopher through the window, seated with his legs on the
table, his hat pushed back, and his spectacles fallen to the point of his
nose, reading, and moving his lips as he read.

The forenoon sun was soft, but the air was cool.

There was still plenty of snow on the upper slopes of the hills, and
there was a drift here and there in a corner of pasture wall in the
valley; but the springtime green was beginning to hover over the wet
places in the fields; the catkins silvered the golden tracery of the
willow branches by the brook; there was a buzz of bees about them, and
about the maples, blackened by the earlier flow of sap through the holes
in the bark made by the woodpeckers' bills. Now and then the tremolo of a
bluebird shook in the tender light and the keen air. At one point in the
road where the sun fell upon some young pines in a sheltered spot a
balsa