"I presume," said the elder woman, "that he's talked to you about it. He
never tells me much. I don't see why you should want to go. What's it
like?"

"Oh, I don't know. But it's the day the graduating class have to
themselves, and all their friends come."

"Well, I don't know why anybody should want to go," said Mrs. Durgin. "I
sha'n't. Tell him he won't want to own me when he sees me. What am I
goin' to wear, I should like to know? What you goin' to wear, Cynthy?"




XXVIII.

Jeff's place at Harvard had been too long fixed among the jays to allow
the hope of wholly retrieving his condition now. It was too late for him
to be chosen in any of the nicer clubs or societies, but he was not
beyond the mounting sentiment of comradery, which begins to tell in the
last year among college men, and which had its due effect with his class.
One of the men, who had always had a foible for humanity, took advantage
of the prevailing mood in another man, and wrought upon him to ask, among
the fellows he was asking to a tea at his rooms, several fellows who were
distinctly and almost typically jay. The tea was for the aunt of the man
who gave it, a very pretty woman from New York, and it was so richly
qualified by young people of fashion from Boston that the infusion of the
jay flavor could not spoil it, if it would not rather add an agreeable
piquancy. This college mood coincided that year with a benevolent emotion