“What do the other fellows do with their Harvard training when they go into business, as nine-tenths of them do?  Business is business, whether you keep a hotel or import dry-goods or manufacture cotton or run a railroad or help a big trust to cheat legally.  Harvard has got to take a back seat when you get out of Harvard.  But you don’t suppose that keeping a summer hotel would mean living in the country the whole time, do you?  That’s the way mother does, but I shouldn’t.  It isn’t good for the hotel, even.  If I had such a place as Lion’s Head, I should put a man and his family into it for the winter to look after it, and I should go to town myself—­to Boston or New York, or I might go to London or Paris.  They’re not so far off, and it’s so easy to get to them that you can hardly keep away.”  Jeff laughed, and looked up at Westover from the log where he sat, whittling a pine stick; Westover sat on the stump from which the log had been felled eight or ten years before.

“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: