She doesn't do it with a smile, necessarily. She grumped about it a lot to me - "I don't know how this is going to end, it's looking really bad, etc." But I'm used to that by now. You only get the truth of it when you talk to her sisters and friends, who all say "I keep telling her not to do that sort of thing, she owes her nothing" - that gives you the exact dimension of her incorrigible and unstoppable generosity. In a world of "what do I get out of this?", my mtoher is a person whose main question is: "What happens if I don't help her?" In fact, I have never known her to reason from "What do i get out of this"-type positions. Incidentally, to correct one impression I may have given: she may grump to ME about her guest, but she would never in a million year do such a thing to HER FACE - and she would never allow anyone else to so much as suggest it. If a person ever feels like a freeloader on my mother's generosity, it is NEVER because my mother does anything to suggest it.