Mrs. Durgin was silent for a time, and then she said. “Jeff, is that your notion about Jackson, or whose is it?”
“It's mine, now.”
Mrs. Durgin waited a moment. Then she began, with a feeling quite at variance with her words:
“Well, I'll thank Cynthy Whit'ell to mind her own business! Of course,” she added, and in what followed her feeling worked to the surface in her words, “I know 't she thinks the world of Jackson, and he does of her; and I presume she means well. I guess she'd be more apt to notice, if there was any change, than what I should. What did she say?”
Jeff told, as nearly as he could remember, and he told what Cynthia and he had afterward jointly worked out as to the best thing for Jackson to do. Mrs. Durgin listened frowningly, but not disapprovingly, as it seemed; though at the end she asked: “And what am I going to do, with Jackson gone?”
Jeff laughed, with his head down. “Well, I guess you and Cynthy could run it, with Frank and Mr. Whitwell.”
“Mr. Whit'ell!” said Mrs. Durgin, concentrating in her accent of his name the contempt she could not justly pour out on the others.
“Oh,” Jeff went on, “I did think that I could take hold with you, if you could bring yourself to let me off this last year at Harvard.”
“Jeff!” said his mother, reproachfully. “You know you don't mean that you'd give up your last year in college?”
“I do mean it, but I don't expect you to do it; and I don't ask it. I suggested it to Cynthy, when we got to talking it over, and she saw it wouldn't do.”