ses they can't
make anything on feeding people, and so they try to make it up on the
rooms. I should feed them well--I believe I know how--and I should make
money on my table, as they do in Europe.

"I've thought a good many things out; my mind runs on it all the time;
but I'm not going to bore you with it now."

"Oh, not at all," said Westover. "I'd like to know what your ideas are."

"Well, some time I'll tell you. But look here, Mr. Westover, I wish if
mother gets to talking about me with you that you'd let her know how I
feel. We can't talk together, she and I, without quarrelling about it;
but I guess you could put in a word that would show her I wasn't quite a
fool. She thinks I've gone crazy from seeing the way they do things in
Europe; that I'm conceited and unpatriotic, and I don't know what all."
Jeff laughed as if with an inner fondness for his mother's
wrong-headedness.

"And would you be willing to settle down here in the country for the rest
of your life, and throw away your Harvard training on hotel-keeping?"

"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,