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