"Yes. But I'm going to try to do it on experience." He laughed, and he did not mind her trying to hit him, for he saw that he had made her curious.
"Do you mean that you have kept a hotel?"
"For three generations," he returned, with a gravity that mocked her from his bold eyes.
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," she said, indifferently. "Where is your hotel? In Boston—New York—Chicago?"
"It's in the country—it's a summer hotel," he said, as before.
She looked away from him toward the other room. "There's my brother. I didn't know he was coming."
"Shall I go and tell him where you are?" Jeff asked, following the direction of her eyes.
"No, no; he can find me," said the girl, sinking back in her chair again. He left her to resume the talk where she chose, and she said: "If it's something ancestral, of course—"
"I don't know as it's that, exactly. My grandfather used to keep a country tavern, and so it's in the blood, but the hotel I mean is something that we've worked up into from a farm boarding-house."
"You don't talk like a country person," the girl broke in, abruptly.