; it has no
yard-stick for the little more or the little less in the return. Perhaps
men can love like that more easily than women do. Uncle Sim seemed to
hint one evening that there is generally a selfish strain in a woman's
love, in that what it gets is more precious to it than what it gives. I
wonder."

Thor received these two letters together on returning to Colorado
Springs from a day's visit to that high wilderness in which John Hay
sought freedom from interruption in writing his _Life of Lincoln_. He
understood fully that Lois was deliberately being cruel in order to be
kind. The very spacing out of her information over two separate days was
meant to impress him and at the same time to spare. Things would be
easier for Claude, she said, when she meant that they would be easier
for him.

But for him it was a matter of indifference. That is, it was the same
kind of matter of indifference that pain becomes in a limb that has
grown benumbed. For reasons he could hardly explain, that part of his
being to which Rosie Fay had made her pathetic appeal couldn't feel any
more. It was like something atrophied from over-strain. There was the
impulse to suffer, but no suffering. Moreover, he was sure that though
these nerves might one day vibrate again, they could never do so
otherwise than reminiscently. To the episode he felt as a mother might
feel to the dead child she has never been able to acknowledge as her
own. It was something buried, and yet sacred--sacred in spite of the
fact that it never should have been. As an incident in his life it had
brought keen joy and keener pain, but he had already outlived both. He
had outlived them as apparently Rosie had outlived them herself--not by
the passage of time, but by an intensity of experience which seemed to
have covered years.

He came to this conclusion not instinctively, nor all at once, but by
dint of reflection, as he sat on the broad terrace of the hotel,
watching the transformation scene that takes place in the Rockies during
the half-hour before sunset. His pipe was in his mouth; Lois's letters
lay open on the little table he had drawn up beside his chair. Other
tourists bore him company, scattered singly or in groups, smoking and
drinking tea. A mild suggestion of Europe, a suggestion of Cap Martin or
of Cannes, was blocked by the domes of the great range and by a shifting
interplay of magic lights where his eye was impelled to look for the
broad, still levels