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 o