've had up Socrates."

"Is that so? It must be very interesting."

Whitwell did not answer, and Westover saw his eye wander. He looked
round. Several ladies were coming across the grass toward him from the
hotel, lifting their skirts and tiptoeing through the dew. They called to
him, "Good-morning, Mr. Whitwell!" and "Are you going up Lion's Head
to-day?" and "Don't you think it will rain?"--"Guess not," said Whitwell,
with a fatherly urbanity and an air of amusement at the anxieties of the
sex which seemed habitual to him. He waited tranquilly for them to come
up, and then asked, with a wave of his hand toward Westover: "Acquainted
with Mr. Westover, the attist?" He named each of them, and it would have
been no great vanity in Westover to think they had made their little
movement across the grass quite as much in the hope of an introduction to
him as in the wish to consult Whitwell about his plans.

The painter found himself the centre of an agreeable excitement with all
the ladies in the house. For this it was perhaps sufficient to be a man.
To be reasonably young and decently good-looking, to be an artist, and an
artist not unknown, were advantages which had the splendor of
superfluity.

He liked finding himself in the simple and innocent American circumstance
again, and he was not sorry to be confronted at once with one of the most
characteristic aspects of our summer. He could read in the present
development of Lion's Head House all the history of its evolution from
the first conception of farm-board, which sufficed the earliest comers,
to its growth in the comforts and conveniences which more fastidious
tastes and larger purses demanded. Before this point was reached, the
boarders would be of a good and wholesome sort, but they would be people
of no social advantages, and not of much cultivation, though they might
be intelligent; they would certainly not be fashionable; five dollars a
week implied all that, except in the case of some wandering artist or the
family of some poor young professor. But when the farm became a
boarding-house and called itself a hotel, as at present with Lion's Head
House, and people paid ten dollars a week, or twelve for transients, a
moment of its character was reached which could not be surpassed when its
prosperity became greater and its inmates more pretentious. In fact, the
people who can afford to pay ten dollars a week for summer board, and not
much more, are often the best of