se this for _my_ wash-basin," he said, indicating a
limpid pool paved with clean gray pebbles.

Sylvia answered in the same note of play, "This'll be mine." It lay
at the foot of a tiny waterfall, plashing with a tinkling note into
transparent shallows. She cast an idle glance on the book he had laid
down and read its title, "A History of the Institution of Property,"
and reflected that she had been right in thinking it had a
familiar-looking cover. She had dusted books with that sort of cover
all her life.

Molly's cousin produced from his overalls a small piece of yellow
kitchen-soap, which he broke into scrupulously exact halves and
presented with a grave flourish to Sylvia. "Now, go to it," he
exhorted her; "I bet I get a better wash than you."

Sylvia took off her hat, rolled up her sleeves, and began on vigorous
ablutions. She had laughed, yes, and heartily, but in her complicated
many-roomed heart a lively pique rubbed shoulders with her mirth, and
her merriment was tinctured with a liberal amount of the traditional
feminine horrified disgust at having been uncomely, at having
unconsciously been subjected to an indignity. She was determined that
no slightest stain should remain on her smooth, fine-textured skin.
She felt, as a pretty woman always feels, that her personality was
indissolubly connected with her looks, and it was a symbolic act which
she performed as she fiercely scrubbed her face with the yellow soap
till its acrid pungency blotted out for her the woodland aroma of
moist earth and green leaves. She dashed the cold water up on her
cheeks till the spattering drops gleamed like crystals on the crisp
waviness of her ruddy brown hair. She washed her hands and arms in the
icy mountain water till they were red with the cold, hot though the
day was. She was chilled, and raw with the crude astringency of the
soap, but she felt cleansed to the marrow of her bones, as though
there had been some mystic quality in this lustration in running
water, performed under the open sky. The racy, black-birch tang still
lingering on her tongue was a flavor quite in harmony with this
severely washed feeling. It was a taste notably clean.

She looked across the brook at her companion, now sitting back on his
heels, and saw that there had emerged from his grime a thin, tanned,
high-nosed face, topped by drab-colored hair of no great abundance and
lighted by a pair of extraordinarily clear, gray eyes. She perceived
no mo