son that side of love seemed to me much
overrated. I was happiest when sitting alone in a sort of trance and
thinking about him."

"Humph!" said Gwynne.

The mist was gone. The east was a vast alcove of gold in which the hills
were set like hard dark jewels. The creek was narrowing. On either side,
and far on all sides, stretched the marsh. The guileless duck disported
himself on the ponds, but Gwynne, for once, was insensible to its
subversive charms, felt no regret that he had forgotten his gun. He came
and sat closer to Isabel, wondering if she felt as young as he did in
the wonderful freshness and beauty of the dawn. She certainly looked
very young and fresh and girlish, not in the least fateful, as when she
turned her profile against a hard background and forgot his presence.

"I think I could quite understand anything you cared to tell me," he
said, smiling into her eyes. "Please give me your reasons for
cultivating the character of a Toledo blade. Is it your intention
to marshal all the clans of all the advanced women and lead them
against the more occupied and disunited sex? I am told that it is
a standing grievance in Rosewater that you will not join that
Literary--Political--Improvement--and all the rest of it Club. I should
think with your ambitions and--well--masterful disposition, you would
assume its leadership as a sort of preliminary course."

"I intend to be a whole club in myself."

"Appalling! But what _do_ you mean by that cryptic assertion? I told you
that I could understand anything you chose to explain, but, as they say
out here, I am not good at guessing."

"I am working out a theory of my own. It has been demonstrated that
labor, capital, all the known forces, are far stronger when concentrated
and organized. I believe in concentrating all the faculties about a will
strong enough not only to conquer life but all the inherited weaknesses
that beset one daily within. That is a minor matter, however. I believe
that our higher faculties were given to us for no purpose but to create
within ourselves an individual strength that will add to the sum of
strength in the world. It is not necessary to proclaim this strength
from the house-tops, nor to search for windmills--a positive enemy it
would leap at automatically--nor even to seek to improve the world by
all the tried and generally futile devices. It is enough to be. I alone
may not add greatly to this subjective strength of the world; but thin