“You are modern,” he said.

“That’s what I should do at first.  But I don’t believe I should have Lion’s Head very long before I had another hotel—­in Florida, or the Georgia uplands, or North Carolina, somewhere.  I should take my help back and forth; it would be as easy to run two hotels as one-easier!  It would keep my hand in.  But if you want to know, I’d rather stick here in the country, year in and year out, and run Lion’s Head, than to be a lawyer and hang round trying to get a case for nine or ten years.  Who’s going to support me?  Do you suppose I want to live on mother till I’m forty?  She don’t think of that.  She thinks I can go right into court and begin distinguishing myself, if I can fight the people off from sending me to Congress.  I’d rather live in the country, anyway.  I think town’s the place for winter, or two-three months of it, and after that I haven’t got any use for it.  But mother, she’s got this old-fashioned ambition to have me go to a city and set up there.  She thinks that if I was a lawyer in Boston I should be at the top of the heap.  But I know better than that, and so do you; and I want you to give her some little hint of how it really is:  how it takes family and money and a lot of influence to get to the top in any city.”

It occurred to Westover, and not for the first time, that the frankest thing in Jeff Durgin was his disposition to use his friends.  It seemed to him that Jeff was always asking something of him, and it did not change the fact that in this case he thought him altogether in the right.  He said that if Mrs. Durgin spoke to him of the matter he would not keep the light from her.  He looked behind him, now, for the first time, in recognition of the place where they had stopped.  “Why, this is Whitwell’s Clearing.”

“Didn’t you know it?” Jeff asked.  “It changes a good deal every year, and you haven’t been here for awhile, have you?”

“Not since Mrs. Marven’s picnic,” said Westover, and he added, quickly, to efface the painful association which he must have called up by his heedless words: 

“The woods have crowded back upon it so.  It can’t be more than half its old size.”

“No,” Jeff assented.  He struck his heel against a fragment of the pine bough he had been whittling, and drove it into the soft ground beside the log, and said, without looking up from it:  “I met that woman at a dance last winter.  It wasn’t her dance, but she was running it as if it were, just the way she did with the picnic.  She seemed to want to let bygones be bygones, and I danced with her daughter.  She’s a nice girl.  I thought mother did wrong about that.”  Now he looked at Westover.  “She couldn’t help it, but it wasn’t the thing to do.  A hotel is a public house, and you can’t act as if it wasn’t.  If mother hadn’t known how to keep a hotel so well in other ways, she might have ruined the house by not knowing in a thing like that.  But we’ve got some of the people