experience in the
gentle art (in which he had been more wooed than wooing), and the affair
had profited him little. This was another affair, and he assured himself
continually that it was a uniquely different and difficult affair. Not
only was here a woman who was not bent on finding a husband, but it was a
woman who wasn't a woman at all; who was genuinely appalled by the
thought of a husband; who joyed in boys' games, and sentimentalized over
such things as adventure; who was healthy and normal and wholesome, and
who was so immature that a husband stood for nothing more than an
encumbrance in her cherished scheme of existence.

But how to approach her? He divined the fanatical love of freedom in
her, the deep-seated antipathy for restraint of any sort. No man could
ever put his arm around her and win her. She would flutter away like a
frightened bird. Approach by contact--that, he realized, was the one
thing he must never do. His hand-clasp must be what it had always been,
the hand-clasp of hearty friendship and nothing more. Never by action
must he advertise his feeling for her. Remained speech. But what
speech? Appeal to her love? But she did not love him. Appeal to her
brain? But it was apparently a boy's brain. All the deliciousness and
fineness of a finely bred woman was hers; but, for all he could discern,
her mental processes were sexless and boyish. And yet speech it must be,
for a beginning had to be made somewhere, some time; her mind must be
made accustomed to the idea, her thoughts turned upon the matter of
marriage.

And so he rode overseeing about the plantation, with tightly drawn and
puckered brows, puzzling over the problem, and steeling himself to the
first attempt. A dozen ways he planned an intricate leading up to the
first breaking of the ice, and each time some link in the chain snapped
and the talk went off on unexpected and irrelevant lines. And then one
morning, quite fortuitously, the opportunity came.

"My dearest wish is the success of Berande," Joan had just said, apropos
of a discussion about the cheapening of freights on copra to market.

"Do you mind if I tell you the dearest wish of my heart?" he promptly
returned. "I long for it. I dream about it. It is my dearest desire."

He paused and looked at her with intent significance; but it was plain to
him that she thought there was nothing more at issue than mutual
confidences about things in general.

"Yes, go a