g a dove out
of Ninety-second Street feels at going walking on the Palisades?"

CHAPTER XXXI

The iron Hudson flowed sullenly, far below the ice-enameled rock on
the Palisades, where stood Ruth and Carl, shivering in the abrupt wind
that cut down the defile. The scowling, slatey river was filled with
ice-floes and chunks of floating, water-drenched snow that broke up
into bobbing sheets of slush. The sky was solid cold gray, with no
arch and no hint of the lost sun. Crows winging above them stood out
against the sky like pencil-marks on clean paper. The estates in upper
New York City, across the river, were snow-cloaked, the trees chilly
and naked, the houses standing out as though they were freezing and
longing for their summer wrap of ivy. And naked were the rattling
trees on their side of the river, on the Palisades. But the cold
breeze enlivened them, the sternness of the swift, cruel river and
miles of brown shore made them gravely happy. As they tramped briskly
off, atop the cliffs, toward the ferry to New York, five miles away,
they talked with a quiet, quick seriousness which discovered them to
each other. It was too cold for conversational fencing. It was too
splendidly open for them not to rejoice in the freedom from New York
streets and feel like heroes conquering the miles.

Carl was telling of Joralemon, of Plato, of his first flights before
country fairs; something of what it meant to be a newspaper hero, and
of his loneliness as a Dethroned Prince. Ruth dropped her defenses of
a chaperoned young woman; confessed that now that she had no mother to
keep her mobilized and in the campaign to get nearer to "Society" and
a "decent marriage," she did not know exactly what she wanted to do
with life. She spoke tentatively of her vague settlement work; in all
she said she revealed an honesty as forthright as though she were a
gaunt-eyed fanatic instead of a lively-voiced girl in a blue corduroy
jacket with collar and cuffs of civet and buttons from Venice.

Then Carl spoke of his religion--the memory of Forrest Haviland. He
had never really talked of him to any one save Colonel Haviland and
Titherington, the English aviator; but now this girl, who had never
seen Forrest, seemed to have known him for life. Carl made vivid by
his earnestness the golden hours of work together in California; the
confidences in New York restaurants; his long passion for their
Brazilian trip. Ruth's eyes looked up at him wit