Jeff, from the vantage of his greater worldly experience, was trying to exchange looks of intelligence with Westover concerning those hotel-dwellers whom his mother revered as aristocrats; but he did not openly question her conceptions.  “They’ve told me how they do, some of the ladies have,” she went on.  “They’ve got the money for it, and they know how to get the most for their money.  Why, Mr. Westover, we’ve got rooms in this house, now, that we let for thirty-five to fifty dollars a week for two persons, and folks like that take ’em right along through August and September, and want a room apiece.  It’s different now, I can tell you, from what it was when folks thought we was killin’ ’em if we wanted ten or twelve dollars.”

Westover had finished his dinner before this tour of the house began, and when it was over the two men strolled away together.

“You see, it’s on the regular American lines,” Jeff pursued, after parting with his mother.  “Jackson’s done it, and he can’t imagine anything else.  I don’t say it isn’t well done in its way, but the way’s wrong; it’s stupid and clumsy.”  When they were got so far from the hotel as to command a prospect of its ungainly mass sprawled upon the plateau, his smouldering disgust burst out:  “Look at it!  Did you ever see anything like it?  I wish the damned thing would burn up—­or down!”

Westover was aware in more ways than one of Jeff’s exclusion from authority in the place, where he was constantly set aside from the management as if his future were so definitely dedicated to another calling that not even his advice was desired or permitted; and he could not help sympathizing a little with him when he chafed at his rejection.  He saw a great deal of him, and he thought him quite up to the average of Harvard’s Seniors in some essentials.  He had been sobered, apparently, by experience; his unfortunate love-affair seemed to have improved him, as the phrase is.

They had some long walks and long talks together, and in one of them Jeff opened his mind, if not his heart, to the painter.  He wanted to be the Landlord of the Lion’s Head, which he believed he could make the best hotel in the mountains.  He knew, of course, that he could not hope to make any changes that did not suit his mother and his brother, as long as they had the control, but he thought they would let him have the control sooner if his mother could only be got to give up the notion of his being a lawyer.  As nearly as he could guess, she wanted him to be a lawyer because she did not want him to be a hotel-keeper, and her prejudice against that was because she believed that selling liquor made her father a drunkard.

“Well, now you know enough about me, Mr. Westover, to know that drink isn’t my danger.”

“Yes, I think I do,” said Westover.