st the excitement of an affair, an
amorous adventure. Neither did he. He wanted me body and soul, and I
recoiled from that finally, because--I was afraid, afraid of what our
life would become when he learned that truth which I had already
grasped, that life can't be lived on the peaks of great emotion and
that there was nothing much else for him and me to go on."

She stopped and looked at Hollister.

"I wonder if you think I'm a little mad?" she asked.

"No. I was just wondering what it is about you that makes men want
you," he returned.

"You should know," she answered bluntly.

"I never knew. I was like Mills: a victim of my emotions. But one
outgrows any feeling if it is clubbed hard enough. I daresay all these
things are natural enough, even if they bring misery in their wake."

"I daresay," she said. "There is nothing unnatural in a man loving me,
any more than it was unnatural for you to love Doris, or for Doris to
have a son. Still you are inclined to blame me for what I've done.
You seem to forget that the object of each individual's existence, man
or woman, is not to bestow happiness on some one else, but to seek it
for themselves."

"That sounds like Lawanne," Hollister observed.

"It's true, no matter who it sounds like," she retorted.

"If you really believe that, you are certainly a fool to go on living
with a man like Jim Bland," Hollister declared. It did not occur to
him that he was displaying irritation.

"I've told you why and I do not see any reason for changing my idea,"
she said coolly. "When it no longer suits me to be a chattel, I shall
cease to be one. Meantime--_pax_--_pax_--

"Where is Doris and the adorable infant?" Myra changed the subject
abruptly. "I don't hear or see one or the other."

"They were all out in the kitchen a minute ago, bathing the kid," he
told her, and Myra went on in.

Hollister's work lay almost altogether in the flat now. The cut cedar
accumulating under the busy hands of six men came pouring down the
chute in a daily stream. To salvage the sticks that spilled, to
arrange the booms for rafting down stream, kept Hollister on the move.
At noon that day Myra and Doris brought the baby and lunch in a basket
and spread it on the ground on the sunny side of an alder near the
chute mouth, just beyond the zone of danger from flying bolts. The
day was warm enough for comfortable lounging. The boy, now grown to be
a round-faced, clear-skinned mite with blue eyes l