lose myself in."

"Then here outside my room," said Ruth, "I'm going to have a brick
terrace, and all around it heliotrope growing in pots on the brick
wall."

"I'm sorry, blessed, but you can't have a terrace. Don't you realize
that every brick would have to be carted two hundred miles through
this wilderness?"

"I don't care. If you appreciated me you'd carry them on your back, if
necessary."

"Well, I'll think it over, but----Oh, look here, I'm going to have a
porch made out of fresh saplings, outside of my room, and it 'll
overlook the hills, and it 'll have outdoor cots with olive-gray army
blankets over them, and when you wake up in the morning you'll see the
hills in the first sunlight."

"Glorious! I'll give up my terrace. Though I do think I was w'eedled
into it."

"Seriously, Ruth, wouldn't you like to have such a place, back in the
wilderness?"

"Love it! I'd be perfectly happy there. At least for a while. I
wouldn't care if I never saw another aigrette or a fat Rhine maiden
singing in thirty sharps."

"Listen, how would this be for a site? (Let me stick some more wood
there on your side of the fire.) Once when I was up in the high
Sierras, in California, I found a wooded bluff--you looked a thousand
feet straight down to a clear lake, green as mint-sauce pretty nearly,
not a wrinkle on it. There wasn't a sound anywhere except when the
leaves rustled. Then on the other side you looked way up to a peak
covered with snow, and a big eagle sailing overhead--sailing and
sailing, hour after hour. And you could smell the pine needles and
sit there and look way off----Would you like it?"

"Oh, I can't tell you how much!"

"Have to go there some day."

"When you're president of the VanZile Company you must give me a
Touricar to go in, and perhaps I shall let you go, too."

"Right! I'll be chauffeur and cook and everything." Quietly exultant
at her sweet, unworded promise of liking, he hastily said, to cover
that thrill, "Even a poor old low-brow mechanic like me does get a
kind of poetic fervor out of a view like that."

"But you aren't a low-brow mechanic. You make me so dreadfully weary
when you're mock-humble. As a matter of fact, you're a famous man and
I'm a poor little street waif. For instance, the way you talk about
socialism when you get interested and let yourself go. Really excited.
I'd always thought that aviators and other sorts of heroes were such
stolid dubs."

"Gee! it'd be natura