“Well, one thing,” said his mother, “is that we’ve got a higher class of boarders than we ever had before.  You’ll see, Mr. Westover, if you stay on here till August.  There’s a class that boards all the year round, and that knows what a hotel is—­about as well as Jeff, I guess.  You’ll find ’em at the big city houses, the first of the winter, and then they go down to Floridy or Georgy for February and March; and they get up to Fortress Monroe in April, and work along north about the middle of May to them family hotels in the suburbs around Boston; and they stay there till it’s time to go to the shore.  They stay at the shore through July, and then they come here in August, and stay till the leaves turn.  They’re folks that live on their money, and they’re the very highest class, I guess.  It’s a round of gayety with ’em the whole year through.”

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.