urmured, "I feel as though
I were lifted up on a great rock." After a moment, opening her eyes, she
said, "You are better than I, you know. I'm not at all sure that I could
say that. I never knew before that I was weak. But then I never met
strength before."

"You're not weak," he told her; adding quaintly, "maybe a little
overballasted; with brains and sensitiveness and under-ballasted with
experience, that's all. But you haven't had much chance to take on any
other cargo, as yet."

She was nettled at this, and leaving her slow, wide-winged poise in the
upper airs, she veered and with swallow-like swiftness darted down on
him. "That sounds patronizing and elder-brotherish," she told him. "I've
taken on all sorts of cargo that you don't know anything about. In ever
so many ways you seem positively . . . naive! You needn't go thinking that
I'm always highstrung and fanciful. I never showed that side to anybody
before, never! Always kept it shut up and locked down and danced and
whooped it up before the door. You know how everybody always thinks of
me as laughing all the time. I do wish everything hadn't been said
already so many times. If it weren't that it's been said so often, I'd
like to say that I have always been laughing to keep from crying."

"Why don't you say it, if that is what you mean?" he proposed.

She looked at him marveling. "I'm so fatuous about you!" she exclaimed;
"the least little thing you say, I see the most wonderful possibilities
in it. I know _you'd_ say what you meant, no matter how many thousands
had said it before. And since I know it's not stupidness in you, why, it
seems to me just splendidly and simply courageous, a kind of courage I'd
never thought of before. I see now, how, after all, those stupid people
had me beaten, because I'd always thought that a person either had to be
stupid so that he didn't _know_ he was saying something everybody else
had said, or else not say it, even if he wanted to, ever so much, and it
was just what he meant."

"Don't you think maybe you're too much bothered about other people,
anyhow?" he suggested, mildly; "whether they're stupid or have said
things or not? What difference does it make, if it's a question of what
you yourself feel? I'd be just as satisfied if you gave _all_ your time
to discovering the wonderful possibilities in what I say. It would give
me a chance to conceal the fact that I get all out of breath trying to
follow what you mean."