ve got to take anything that comes along."

"And, you fool, do you suppose I'd be here if I had anything at all? Do
you suppose I'd stay in this damn lost hole if I could get anywhere else?
Do you think I have no more possibilities than this?"

He mounted the ladder, and emerged upon the platform by her side, where he
found a place, a minute, for a cigarette.

The woman's face was bitter, her body tense.

"I'll grow old and die in places like this," she continued passionately;
"I'll grow old and die in pokey, little schools, and wear prim calico
dresses, with a remade old white mull for commencements. I'll never hear
anything but twice two, and Persia is bounded on the north by,--with all
the world beyond, Paris and London and Egypt, for the lucky. I want to
live," she cried to Gordon Makimmon, idly curious, to the still branches
of the apple trees, the vista of village half-hid in dusty foliage. "I
want to see things, things different, not these dumb, depressing
mountains. I want to see life!"

Gordon had a swift memory of a city street grey in a reddening flood of
dawn, of his own voice in a reddening flood of dawn, of his own voice
mumbling out of an overwhelming, nauseous desperation that same
determination, desire. "Perhaps," he ventured, "you wouldn't think so much
of it when you'd seen it."

"Wouldn't I?" she exclaimed; "oh, wouldn't I?--smart crowds and gay
streets and shops on fire with jewels. That's where I belong; I'd show
them; I've got a style, if I only had a chance! I've got a
figure ... shoulders."

He appraised in a veiled glance her physical pretensions. He discovered,
to his surprise, that she had "shoulders"; her body resembled her hands,
it was smoothly rounded, provocative; its graceful proportion deceived
the casual eye.

With a disdainful motion she kicked off a heavily clumsy slipper--her
instep arched narrowly to a delicate ankle, the small heel was sharply
cut. "In silk," she said, "and a little brocaded slipper, you would see."
She replaced the inadequate thing of leather. The animation died from her
countenance, she surveyed him with cold eyes, narrowed lips. Her gaze, he
felt, included him in the immediate, hateful scene; she gained fresh
repugnance from his stained, collarless shirt, his bagging knees coated
with sawdust.

She rose, and, her skirt gathered in one hand, descended the precarious
flight of steps. She crossed the grass slowly, her head bent, her hands
tightly clenc