, isn't it? I always thought that
painters were----"

"Of course. They should be. Maybe they are. I don't know. Sometimes I
am. But not to-day."

"Well, I should think you ought to be so much more contented than just
ordinary people. Now, I----"

"You!" he cried--"you are not 'just ordinary people.'"

"Well, but when I try to recall what I have thought about in my life, I
can't remember, you know. That's what I mean."

"You shouldn't talk that way," he told her.

"But why do you insist that life should be so highly absorbing for me?"

"You have everything you wish for," he answered, in a voice of deep
gloom.

"Certainly not. I am a woman."

"But----"

"A woman, to have everything she wishes for, would have to be
Providence. There are some things that are not in the world."

"Well, what are they?" he asked of her.

"That's just it," she said, nodding her head, "no one knows. That's
what makes the trouble."

"Well, you are very unreasonable."

"What?"

"You are very unreasonable. If I were you--an heiress----"

The girl flushed and turned upon him angrily.

"Well!" he glowered back at her. "You are, you know. You can't deny it."

She looked at the red-stained crags. At last she said, "You seemed
really contemptuous."

"Well, I assure you that I do not feel contemptuous. On the contrary, I
am filled with admiration. Thank Heaven, I am a man of the world.
Whenever I meet heiresses I always have the deepest admiration." As he
said this he wore a brave hang-dog expression. The girl surveyed him
coldly from his chin to his eyebrows. "You have a handsome audacity,
too."

He lay back in the long grass and contemplated the clouds.

"You should have been a Chinese soldier of fortune," she said.

He threw another little clod at Stanley and struck him on the head.

"You are the most scientifically unbearable person in the world," she
said.

Stanley came back to see his master and to assure himself that the clump
on the head was not intended as a sign of serious displeasure. Hawker
took the dog's long ears and tried to tie them into a knot.

"And I don't see why you so delight in making people detest you," she
continued.

Having failed to make a knot of the dog's ears, Hawker leaned back and
surveyed his failure admiringly. "Well, I don't," he said.

"You do."

"No, I don't."

"Yes, you do. You just say the most terrible things as if you positively
enjoyed saying them."

"Well, what did I say