."

"Oh, I'm not in it at all, Mr. Westover," said the young fellow. "I'm as
much a passenger as you are. The only difference is that I'm allowed to
work my passage."

"Well, one thing," said his mother, "is that we've got a higher class of
boarders than we ever had before. You'll see, Mr. Westover, if you stay
on here till August. There's a class that boards all the year round, and
that knows what a hotel is--about as well as Jeff, I guess. You'll find
'em at the big city houses, the first of the winter, and then they go
down to Floridy or Georgy for February and March; and they get up to
Fortress Monroe in April, and work along north about the middle of May to
them family hotels in the suburbs around Boston; and they stay there till
it's time to go to the shore. They stay at the shore through July, and
then they come here in August, and stay till the leaves turn. They're
folks that live on their money, and they're the very highest class, I
guess. It's a round of gayety with 'em the whole year through."

Jeff, from the vantage of his greater worldly experience, was trying to
exchange looks of intelligence with Westover concerning those
hotel-dwellers whom his mother revered as aristocrats; but he did not
openly question her conceptions. "They've told me how they do, some of
the ladies have," she went on. "They've got the money for it, and they
know how to get the most for their money. Why, Mr. Westover, we've got
rooms in this house, now, that we let for thirty-five to fifty dollars a
week for two persons, and folks like that take 'em right along through
August and September, and want a room apiece. It's different now, I can
tell you, from what it was when folks thought we was killin' 'em if we
wanted ten or twelve dollars."

Westover had finished his dinner before this tour of the house began, and
when it was over the two men strolled away together.

"You see, it's on the regular American lines," Jeff pursued, after
parting with his mother. "Jackson's done it, and he can't imagine
anything else. I don't say it isn't well done in its way, but the way's
wrong; it's stupid and clumsy." When they were got so far from the hotel
as to command a prospect of its ungainly mass sprawled upon the plateau,
his smouldering disgust burst out: "Look at it! Did you ever see anything
like it? I wish the damned thing would burn up--or down!"

Westover was aware in more ways than one of Jeff's exclusion from
authority in the place