"Yes, I like my own house. They've wanted me to come up here often
enough, but I'm satisfied where I am. It's quiet down there, and, when I
get through for the day, I can read. And I like to keep my family
together. Cynthy and Frank always sleep at home, and Jombateeste eats
with me. You remember Jombateeste?"
Westover had to say that he did not.
"Well, I don't know as you did see him much. He was that Canuck I had
helpin' me clear that piece over on Lion's Head for the pulp-mill;
pulp-mill went all to thunder, and I never got a cent. And sometimes
Jackson comes down with his plantchette, and we have a good time."
"Jackson still believes in the manifestations?"
"Yes. But he's never developed much himself. He can't seem to do much
without the plantchette. We've had up some of them old philosophers
lately. We'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 the American people, or, at least, of
the New England people. They may not know it, and those who are richer
may not imagine it. They are apt to be middle-aged maiden ladies from
university towns, living upon carefully guarded investments; young
married ladies with a scant child or two, and needing rest and change of
air; college professors with nothing but their modest salaries; literary
men or women in the beginning of their tempered success; clergymen and
their wives away from their churches in the larger country towns or the
smaller suburbs of the cities; here and there an agreeable bachelor in
middle life, fond of literature and nature; hosts of young and pretty
girls with distinct tastes in art, and devoted to the clever young
painter who leads them to the sources of inspiration in the fields and
woods. Such people are refined, humane, appreciative, sympathetic; and
Westover, fresh from the life abroad where life is seldom so free as ours
without some stain, was glad to find himself in the midst of this
unrestraint, which was so sweet and pure. He had seen enough of rich
people to know that riches seldom bought the highest qualities, even
among his fellow-countrymen who suppose that riches can do everything,
and the first aspects of society at Lion's Head seemed to him Arcadian.
There really proved to be a shepherd or two among all that troop of
shepherdesses, old and young; though it was in the middle of the week,
remote alike from the Saturday of arrivals and the Monday of departures.
To be sure, there was none quite so young as himself, except Jeff Durgin,
who was officially exterior to the social life.
The painter who gave lessons to the ladies was already a man of forty,
and he was strongly dragoned round by a wife almost as old, who had taken
great pains to secure him for herself, and who worked him to far greater
advantage in his profession than he could possibly have worked himself:
she got him orders; sold his pictures, even in Boston, where they never
buy American pictures; found him pupils, and kept the boldest of these
from flirting with him. Westover, who was so newly from Paris, was able
to console him with talk of the salons and ateliers, which he had not
heard from so directly in ten years. After the first inevitable moment of
jealousy, his wife forgave Westover when she found that he did not want
pupils, and she took a leading part in the movement to have him read
Browning at a picnic, organized by the ladies shortly after he came.