Yes, I mean Jeff shall go to college."
"Bowdoin or Dartmouth?" Westover suggested.
" Well, I guess you'll think I'm about as forth-putting as I was when Iwanted you to give me a three-hundred-dollar picture for a week's board.""I only got a hundred and sixty, Mrs. Durgin," said Westover, conscientiously.
"Well, it's a shame. Any rate, three hundred's the price to all my boarders. My, if I've told that story once, I guess I've told it fifty times!"Mrs. Durgin laughed at herself jollily, and Westover noted how prosperity had changed her. It had freed her tongue, it has brightened her humor, it had cheered her heart; she had put on flesh, and her stalwart frame was now a far greater bulk than he remembered.
"Well, there," she said, "the long and the short of it is, I want Jeff should go to Harvard."He commanded himself to say: " I don't see why he shouldn't."Mrs. Durgin called out, "Come in, Jackson," and Westover looked round and saw the elder son like a gaunt shadow in the doorway. "I've just got where I've told Mr. Westover where I want Jeff should go. It don't seem to have ca'd him off his feet any, either.""I presume," said Jackson, coming in and sitting lankly down in the feather-cushioned rocking-chair which his mother pushed toward him with her foot, "that the expense would be more at Harvard than it would at the other colleges.""If you want the best you got to pay for it," said Mrs. Durgin.
"I suppose it would cost more," Westover answered Jackson's conjecture.
"I really don't know much about it. One hears tremendous stories at Boston of the rate of living among the swell students in Cambridge.
People talk of five thousand a year, and that sort of thing." Mrs.
Durgin shut her lips, after catching her breath. "But I fancy that it's largely talk. I have a friend whose son went through Harvard for a thousand a year, and I know that many fellows do it for much less.""I guess we can manage to let Jeff have a thousand a year," said Mrs.
Durgin, proudly, "and not scrimp very much, either."She looked at her elder son, who said: "I don't believe but what we could. It's more of a question with me what sort of influence Jeff would come under there. I think he's pretty much spoiled here.""Now, Jackson!" said his mother.
"I've heard," said Westover, "that Harvard takes the nonsense out of a man. I can't enter into what you say, and it isn't my affair; but in regard to influence at Harvard, it depends upon the set Jeff is thrown with or throws himself with. So, at least, I infer from what I've heard my friend say of his son there. There are hard-working sets, loafing sets, and fast sets; and I suppose it isn't different at Harvard in such matters from other colleges."Mrs. Durgin looked a little grave. "Of course," she said, " we don't know anybody at Cambridge, except some ladies that boarded with us one summer, and I shouldn't want to ask any favor of them. The trouble would be to get Jeff started right."Westover surmised a good many things, but in the absence of any confidences from the Durgins he could not tell just how much Jackson meant in saying that Jeff was pretty much spoiled, or how little.
At first, from Mrs. Durgin's prompt protest, he fancied that Jackson meant that the boy had been over-indulged by his mother: "I understand,"he said, in default of something else to say, "that the requirements at Harvard are pretty severe.""He's passed his preliminary examinations," said Jackson, with a touch of hauteur, "and I guess he can enter this fall if we should so decide.
He'll have some conditions, prob'ly, but none but what he can work off, I guess.""Then, if you wish to have him go to college, by all means let him go to Harvard, I should say. It's our great university and our oldest. I'm not a college man myself; but, if I were, I should wish to have been a Harvard man. If Jeff has any nonsense in him, it will take it out;and I don't believe there's anything in Harvard, as Harvard, to make him worse.""That's what we both think," said Jackson.
