Westover believed Lynde understood Jeff to be a country gentleman of sporting tastes, and he would not let that pass.  “Yes, it’s the pleasantest little hotel in the mountains.”

“Strictly-temperance, I suppose?” said Alan, trying to smile with lips that obeyed him stiffly.  He appeared not to care who or what Jeff was; the champagne had washed away all difference between them.  He went on to say that he had heard of Jeff’s intention of running the hotel himself when he got out of Harvard.  He held it to be damned good stuff.

Jeff laughed.  “Your sister wouldn’t believe me when I told her.”

“I think I didn’t mention Miss Lynde,” said Alan, haughtily.

Jeff filled his glass; Alan looked at it, faltered, and then drank it off.  The talk began again between the young men, but it left Westover out, and he had to go away.  Whether Jeff was getting Lynde beyond himself from the love of mischief, such as had prompted him to tease little children in his boyhood, or was trying to ingratiate himself with the young fellow through his weakness, or doing him harm out of mere thoughtlessness, Westover came away very unhappy at what he had seen.  His unhappiness connected itself so distinctly with Lynde’s family that he went and sat down beside Miss Lynde from an obscure impulse of compassion, and tried to talk with her.  It would not have been so hard if she were merely deaf, for she had the skill of deaf people in arranging the conversation so that a nodded yes or no would be all that was needed to carry it forward.  But to Westover she was terribly dull, and he was gasping, as in an exhausted receiver, when Bessie came up with a smile of radiant recognition for his extremity.  She got rid of her partner, and devoted herself at once to Westover.  “How good of you!” she said, without giving him the pain of an awkward disclaimer.

He could counter in equal sincerity and ambiguity, “How beautiful of you.”

“Yes,” she said, “I am looking rather well, tonight; but don’t you think effective would have been a better word?” She smiled across her aunt at him out of a cloud of pink, from which her thin shoulders and slender neck emerged, and her arms, gloved to the top, fell into her lap; one of them seemed to terminate naturally in the fan which sensitively shared the inquiescence of her person.

“I will say effective, too, if you insist,” said Westover.  “But at the same time you’re the most beautiful person here.”

“How lovely of you, even if you don’t mean it,” she sighed.  “If girls could have more of those things said to them, they would be better, don’t you think?  Or at least feel better.”

Westover laughed.  “We might organize a society—­they have them for nearly everything now—­for saying pleasant things to young ladies with a view to the moral effect.”

“Oh, do I.”

“But it ought to be done conscientiously, and you couldn’t go round telling every one that she was the most beautiful girl in the room.”