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"Well, she ha'n't took wing yet, I'm thankful to think," said Whitwell, and he spoke from his own large mind to the sympathy of an old friend who he felt could almost share his feelings as a father. When Westover turned out of the baking little street where the Whitwells lived into an elm-shaded stretch of North Avenue, he took off his hat and strolled bareheaded along in the cooler air.
We've had up some of them old philosophers lately. We've had up Socrates." "Is that so? It must be very interesting." Whitwell did not answer, and Westover saw his eye wander. He looked round. Several ladies were coming across the grass toward him from the hotel, lifting their skirts and tiptoeing through the dew. They called to him, "Good-morning, Mr.
"I know what you mean, father," said the girl, "and I don't want to shirk my responsibility. It was everything to have him come right up and tell me." "Well," said Whitwell, impartially, "as far forth as that goes, I don't think he's strained himself. He'd know you would hear of it sooner or later anyway, and he ha'n't just found out that he was goin' wrong.
"Oh, we should only be too happy," said the mother, and her daughter, from her inflection, knew that she would be willing to defer her happiness. But Jeff did not. "Mr. Whitwell !" he called out, and Whitwell came across the grass to the edge of the veranda. "I want to introduce you to Mrs. Vostrand and Miss Vostrand."
"Well, that's something so," said Whitwell, with pleasure in the distinction rather than assent. "But I guess it ain't original sin in the boy. Got it from his gran'father pootty straight, I should say, and maybe the old man had it secondhand. Ha'd to say just where so much cussedness gits statted."
The liberal Forster, always eager to find "an excuse for the glass," announced a grand reconciliation dinner, to which came a rather notable party, to wit, Thomas Carlyle, Browning and his son, the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, the editor of Pope, and sometime editor of the Quarterly, the young Robert Lytton, myself, and some others whom I have forgotten. What an agreeable banquet it was!
At first Westover thought they were fishhooks and artificial flies, such as the guides wear in the Adirondacks to advertise their calling about the hotel offices and the piazzas. But another glance showd him that they were sprays and wild flowers of various sorts, with gay mosses and fungi and some stems of Indian-pipe. Whitwell seemed pleased that these things should have caught Westover's eye.
The ladies said they did not see how Jeff was ever going to get through with the wagon, and they expressed fears for the lunch he was bringing, which seemed only too well grounded. But Whitwell, who was leading them on, said: "You let a Durgin alone to do a thing when he's made up his mind to it.
Westover," Mrs. Durgin went on, with the comfortable superiority of elderly people to all the trials of the young. "I don't know why she should make a stranger of you, every time. You've known her pretty much all her life." "Ever since you give Jeff what he deserved for scaring her and Frank with his dog," said Whitwell. "Poor Fox!" Mrs. Durgin sighed.
"That's something so," said Whitwell, with a relenting laugh. "If one came back from the dead, to tell us of a life beyond the grave, we should want the assurance that he'd really been dead, and not merely dreaming." Whitwell laughed again, in the delight the philosophic mind finds even in the reasoning that hates it.
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