l piece of wood you have in
that chair-back." She laid her ungloved, rosy finger-tips on a dark
piece of oak. "And so this is where you work?"

"I work everywhere," he told her. "I do all that's done, you see."

"You must have to walk quite a ways to get your meals, don't you?" Lydia
turned her white neck to glance inside the house.

Rankin's mouth twitched humorously. "You'll never understand me," he
said lightly. "I get my meals myself, here."

Lydia turned on him sharply. "You don't _cook_!" she cried out.

"And wash dishes, and make my bed, and sweep my floor, and, once in a
great while, dust."

The romantic curiosity died out of the girl's eyes into a shocked
wonder. She glanced at his large brown hands, and seemed about to speak.
Nothing came from her lips finally, however, beyond the pregnant "Well!"
which seemed the only expression in her vocabulary for extreme surprise.
Rankin threw back his head, showing a triangle of very white throat
above his loose collar, and laughed aloud. The sound of his mirth was so
infectious that Lydia laughed with him, though half uneasily.

"It's so funny," he explained, "to see the picture of myself I gather
from your shocked and candid eyes. I'm so used to my queer ideas
nowadays that I forget that what seems perfectly natural to me still
seems perfectly crazy to others."

"Well, not _crazy_." Lydia proffered this negation in so halting an
accent that Rankin burst into another peal of laughter. "But it must be
horrid for you to wash dishes and cook!" protested Lydia, feeling
resentful that her inculcated horror of a man's "lowering himself" to
woman's work should be taken with so little seriousness. She tried to
rearrange a mental picture which the other was continually destroying.
"But I suppose it's very picturesque. You cook over an open fire, I
imagine."

There was a humorous glint in his eye, "I cook over the best brand of
oil-stove that money can buy," he told her, relentlessly, watching her
wince from the sordid image. "I have all the conveniences I can think
of. All I'm trying to do is to get myself fed with the least expenditure
of gray matter and time on my part, and as things are now arranged in
this particular corner of the country I find I can do it best this way.
It's more work trying to persuade somebody who doesn't want to wait on
me than to jump up and do it myself. Also, having brains, I can
certainly cook like a house afire."

At this, Lydia was ove