in the larger world, from which fashion was not exempt. Society had just
been stirred by the reading of a certain book, which had then a very
great vogue, and several people had been down among the wretched at the
North End doing good in a conscience-stricken effort to avert the
millennium which the book in question seemed to threaten. The lady who
matronized the tea was said to have done more good than you could imagine
at the North End, and she caught at the chance to meet the college jays
in a spirit of Christian charity. When the man who was going to give the
tea rather sheepishly confessed what the altruistic man had got him in
for, she praised him so much that he went away feeling like the hero of a
holy cause. She promised the assistance and sympathy of several brave
girls, who would not be afraid of all the jays in college.

After all, only one of the jays came. Not many, in fact, had been asked,
and when Jeff Durgin actually appeared, it was not known that he was both
the first and the last of his kind. The lady who was matronizing the tea
recognized him, with a throe of her quickened conscience, as the young
fellow whom she had met two winters before at the studio tea which Mr.
Westover had given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and whom she
had never thought of since, though she had then promised herself to do
something for him. She had then even given him some vague hints of a
prospective hospitality, and she confessed her sin of omission in a swift
but graphic retrospect to one of her brave girls, while Jeff stood
blocking out a space for his stalwart bulk amid the alien elegance just
within the doorway, and the host was making his way toward him, with an
outstretched hand of hardy welcome.

At an earlier period of his neglect and exclusion, Jeff would not have
responded to the belated overture which had now been made him, for no
reason that he could divine. But he had nothing to lose by accepting the