diments. Her instinct warned her
that stripped of his worldly goods he would be wholly commonplace. She
could be friends with the Paul Abbey kind of man, but when she tried to
consider him as a possible lover, she found herself unresponsive, even
amused. She was forced to consider it, because Abbey was fast
approaching that stage. It was heralded in the look of dumb appeal that
she frequently surprised in his gaze, by various signs and tokens, that
Stella Benton was too sophisticated to mistake. One of these days he
would lay his heart, and hand at her feet.

Sometimes she considered what her life might be if she should marry him.
Abbey was wealthy in his own right and heir to more wealth. But--she
could not forbear a wry grimace at the idea. Some fateful hour love
would flash across her horizon, a living flame. She could visualize the
tragedy if it should be too late, if it found her already bound--sold
for a mess of pottage at her ease. She did not mince words to herself
when she reflected on this matter. She knew herself as a creature of
passionate impulses, consciously resenting all restraint. She knew that
men and women did mad things under the spur of emotion. She wanted no
shackles, she wanted to be free to face the great adventure when it
came.

Yet there were times during the weeks that flitted past when it seemed
to her that no bondage could be meaner, more repugnant, than that daily
slavery in her brother's kitchen; that transcendent conceptions of love
and marriage were vain details by comparison with aching feet and
sleep-heavy eyes, with the sting of burns, the smart of sweat on her
face, all the never-ending trifles that so irritated her. She had been
spoiled in the making for so sordid an existence. Sometimes she would
sit amid the array of dishes and pans and cooking food and wonder if she
really were the same being whose life had been made up of books and
music, of teas and dinners and plays, of light, inconsequential chatter
with genial, well-dressed folk. There was no one to talk to here and
less time to talk. There was nothing to read except a batch of
newspapers filtering into camp once a week or ten days. There was not
much in this monster stretch of giant timber but heat and dirt and flies
and hungry men who must be fed.

If Paul Abbey had chanced to ask her to marry him during a period of
such bodily and spiritual rebellion, she would probably have committed
herself to that means of escape in