in?" Jack begged in serious urgency. "I pride
myself that it is almost intellectual toward the close."

"I have no doubt," she said, looking fairly at him from under her hand,
which she held up to shade her face, so he saw only the snap of her eyes
in the shadow. "But I am in a hurry."

And he was looking at a shoulder and a quarter profile as she
turned away.

"Did you make the jelly yourself?" he called.

"Yes, I am not afraid of the truth--I did!" she answered with a backward
glance and not stopping.

"Oh, bully!" he exclaimed with great enthusiasm, in which she detected a
strain of what she classified as impudence.

"But all the time the giant was fumbling in his pocket for his green
handkerchief. You know the dwarf did not like green. It fussed him just
as much as yellow fussed the giant. But it was a narrow pocket, so narrow
that he could only get his big thumb in, and very deep. So, you see--"
and she heard the tale proceeding as she walked on to the end of the
street, where she turned around and came back across the desert and
through the garden.

On the way she found it amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human
exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers
had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the
pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of
real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen
under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a
bronze or an ivory statuette.

1. In his favor: Firstly, children were fond of him; but his extravagance
of phrase and love of applause accounted for that. Secondly, Firio was
devoted to him. Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian
to any Saxon was remarkable. Yet this was explained by his love of color,
his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and,
mostly, by his latent savagery--which she would hardly have been willing
to apply to Ignacio's worshipful attachment to herself.

2. Against him: Everything of any importance, except in the eyes of
children and savages; everything in logic. He would not stand analysis at
all. He was without definite character. He was posing, affected, pleased
with himself, superficial, and theatrical, and interested in people only
so long as they amused him or gratified his personal vanity.

"I had the best of the argument in leaving the jelly on the hedge, and
th