ame on nature for making you a wonderfully attractive
woman. I did honestly try to find the way to Cariboo Meadows that
first night. It was only when I found myself thinking how fine it
would be to pike through these old woods and mountains with a partner
like you that I decided--as I did. I'm human--the woman, she tempted
me. And aren't you better off? I could hazard a guess that you were
running away from yourself--or something--when you struck Cariboo
Meadows. And what's Cariboo Meadows but a little blot on the face of
this fair earth, where you were tied to a deadly routine in order to
earn your daily bread? You don't care two whoops about anybody there.
Here you are free--free in every sense of the word. You have no
responsibility except what you impose on yourself; no board bills to
pay; nobody to please but your own little self. You've got the clean,
wide land for a bedroom, and the sky for its ceiling, instead of a
stuffy little ten-by-ten chamber. Do you know that you look fifty per
cent better for these few days of living in the open--the way every
normal being likes to live? You're getting some color in your cheeks,
and you're losing that worried, archangel look. Honest, if I were a
physician, I'd have only one prescription: Get out into the wild
country, and live off the country as your primitive forefathers did.
Of course, you can't do that alone. I know because I've tried it. We
humans don't differ so greatly from the other animals. We're made to
hunt in couples or packs. There's a purpose, a law, you might say,
behind that, too; only it's terribly obscured by a lot of other
nonessentials in this day and age.

"Is there any comparison between this sort of life, for instance--if it
appeals to one at all--and being a stenographer and bucking up against
the things any good-looking, unprotected girl gets up against in a
city? You know, if you'd be frank, that there isn't. Shucks! Herding
in the mass, and struggling for a mere subsistence, like dogs over a
bone, degenerates man physically, mentally, and morally--all our
vaunted civilization and culture to the contrary notwithstanding. Eh?"

But she would not take up the cudgels against him, would not seem to
countenance or condone his offense by discussing it from any angle
whatsoever. And she was the more determined to allow no degree of
friendliness, even in conversation, because she recognized the
masterful quality of the man. She told