The event brought him relief, and it brought him freedom.  He was sensible in his relaxation of having strained up to another’s ideal, of having been hampered by another’s will.  His pleasure in the relief was tempered by a regret, not wholly unpleasant, for the girl whose aims, since they were no longer his, must be disappointed.  He was sorry for Cynthia, and in his remorse he was fonder of her than he had ever been.  He felt her magnanimity and clemency; he began to question, in that wordless deep of being where volition begins, whether it would not be paying a kind of duty to her if he took her at her word and tried to go back to Bessie Lynde.  But for the present he did nothing but renounce all notion of working at his conditions, or attempting to take a degree.  That was part of a thing that was past, and was no part of anything to come, so far as Jeff now forecast his future.

He did not choose to report himself to Westover, and risk a scolding, or a snubbing.  He easily forgave Westover for the tone he had taken at their last meeting, but he did not care to see him.  He would have met him half-way, however, in a friendly advance, and he was aware of much good-will toward him, which he could not have been reluctant to show if chance had brought them together.

Jeff missed Cynthia’s letters which used to come so regularly every Tuesday, and he had a half-hour every Sunday which was at first rather painfully vacant since he no longer wrote to her.  But in this vacancy he had at least no longer the pang of self-reproach which her letters always brought him, and he was not obliged to put himself to the shame of concealment in writing to her.  He had never minded that tacit lying on his own account, but he hated it in relation to her; it always hurt him as something incongruous and unfit.  He wrote to his mother now on Sunday, and in his first letter, while the impression of Cynthia’s dignity and generosity was still vivid, he urged her to make it clear to the girl that he wished her and her family to remain at Lion’s Head as if nothing had happened.  He put a great deal of real feeling into this request, and he offered to go and spend a year in Europe, if his mother thought that Cynthia would be more reconciled to his coming back at the end of that time.

His mother answered with a dryness to which his ear supplied the tones of her voice, that she would try to get along in the management of Lion’s Head till his brother got back, but that she had no objection to his going to Europe for a year if he had the money to spare.  Jeff could not refuse her joke, as he felt it, a certain applause, but he thought it pretty rough that his mother should take part so decidedly against him as she seemed to be doing.  He had expected her to be angry with him, but before they parted she had seemed to find some excuse for him, and yet here she was siding against her own son in what he might very well consider an unnatural way.