lize that it
was a bridge I was building, I might have done the thing with some
imagination and subtlety. If you want a rock and you say I am a rock, a
rock I'll be, Linda. But I know what you are, and what you will be to me
when we really become the kind of friends we are destined to be."

"I wonder now," said Linda, "if you are going to say that I could be any
such lovely thing on the landscape as a bridge."

"No," said Peter slowly, "nothing so prosaic. Bridges are common in
this world. You are going to be something uncommon. History records
the experiences of but one man who has seen a flame in the open. I am a
second Moses and you are going to be my burning bush. I intended to read
this article to you."

Peter massed the sheets, straightened them on the desk, and deliberately
ripped them across several times. Linda sprang to her feet and stretched
out her hands.

"Why, Peter!" she cried in a shocked voice. "That is perfectly
inexcusable. There are hours and hours of work on that, and I have not a
doubt but that it was good work."

"Simple case of mechanism," said Peter, reducing the bits to smaller
size and dropping them into the empty nail keg that served as his
wastebasket. "A lifeless thing without a soul, mere clockwork. I have
got the idea now. I am to build a bridge and make a road. Every way
I look I can see a golden-flame tongue of inspiration burning. I'll
rewrite that thing and animate it. Take me for a ride, Linda."

Linda rose and walked to the Bear Cat. Peter climbed in and sat beside
her. Linda laid her hands on the steering wheel and started the car. She
ran it down to the highway and chose a level road leading straight
down the valley through cultivated country. In all the world there was
nothing to equal the panorama that she spread before Peter that evening.
She drove the Bear Cat past orchards, hundreds of acres of orchards
of waxen green leaves and waxen white bloom of orange, grapefruit, and
lemon. She took him where seas of pink outlined peach orchards, and
other seas the more delicate tint of the apricots. She glided down
avenues lined with palm and eucalyptus, pepper and olive, and through
unbroken rows, extending for miles, of roses, long stretches of white,
again a stretch of pink, then salmon, yellow, and red. Nowhere in all
the world are there to be found so many acres of orchard bloom and
so many miles of tree-lined, rose-decorated roadway as in southern
California. She sent the