our injury like a man, you'd have gotten a hold on my
tenderness and respect that nothing could have destroyed? Sara, I've
watched you degenerate for eight years, but I never realized to what a
depth you had sunk until you came to the Project."

"What do you see in the Project," said Sara. "What does it really matter
whether private or public interests control it? Who really cares?"

"Lots of people care. Jim cares."

"Pshaw!" sneered Sara. "All Jim Manning really cares about is his own
pigheaded sense of race and nationality."

"Jim needs that sense for his propelling power," said Pen. "I believe
that just as soon as a man loses his sense of nationality, he loses a
lot of his social force. Love of country--a man that hasn't it lacks
something very fine, like family pride and honor. Jim's sense of race is
the keynote to his character. And just as much as the New Englanders
have lost that sense, have they lost their grip on the trend of the
nation. They are the type that can't do without it."

Sara eyed Pen curiously. She had turned to look out over the desert
distances so that Sara saw her profile clean cut against the sky. She
was only a girl and yet she had lived through much. Sara looked at her
noble head, high arched above her ears; at her short nose and full soft
mouth, at her straight brow, all blending in an outline that was that of
the thinker, infinitely sad in its intelligence.

"That was a very highbrow statement of yours, Pen," he said, less
harshly than usual. "How did you come to think about these things?"

Pen turned to look at him. "Marrying you made me," she said. "I had to
use my mind. I had no family. I had no talents. I had to teach myself a
sense of proportion that would keep you from wrecking me. I wanted to
get to look at myself as one human living with millions of other humans
and not as Pen, the center of her own universe." Pen laughed a little
wistfully. "Since I couldn't mother children of my own, naturally, I had
to mother the world."

Sara grunted. "Huh! Who can say my life has been altogether a failure?"

Sudden tears sprang to Pen's eyes. "Why, Sara, what a dear thing to say!
And I thought you would remove my hair because of Jim's message."

The sneer returned to Sara's voice. "You ask Jim if he ever heard of
locking the barn too late? Tell him to bring on his 'armed guards.'"

Pen was startled. "Sara, what have you done?"

Sara laughed. "If you and Jim don't know, I'm not the