in ruins and Nature had reduced herself to that
necessary chaos, out of which, when the coming snow completed its task,
she would build a new heaven and a new earth.

An artist might have had some such poetic fancy, and would certainly
have looked lovingly on the alluring colors and forms of decay. But Miss
Greeby was no artist, and prided herself upon being an aggressively
matter-of-fact young woman. With her big boots slapping the ground and
her big hands thrust into the pockets of her mannish jacket, she bent
her head in a meditative fashion and trudged briskly onward. What
romance her hard nature was capable of, was uppermost now, but it
had to do strictly with her personal feelings and did not require the
picturesque autumn landscape to improve or help it in any way. One man's
name suggested romance to bluff, breezy Clara Greeby, and that name was
Noel Lambert. She murmured it over and over again to her heart, and her
hard face flushed into something almost like beauty, as she remembered
that she would soon behold its owner. "But he won't care," she said
aloud, and threw back her head defiantly: then after a pause, she
breathed softly, "But I shall make him care."

If she hoped to do so, the task was one which required a great amount of
skill and a greater amount of womanly courage, neither of which
qualities Miss Greeby possessed. She had no skill in managing a man, as
her instincts were insufficiently feminine, and her courage was of a
purely rough-and-tumble kind. She could have endured hunger and thirst
and cold: she could have headed a forlorn hope: she could have held to a
sinking ship: but she had no store of that peculiar feminine courage
which men don't understand and which women can't explain, however much
they may exhibit it. Miss Greeby was an excellent comrade, but could not
be the beloved of any man, because of the very limitations of
semi-masculinity upon which she prided herself. Noel Lambert wanted a
womanly woman, and Lady Agnes was his ideal of what a wife should be.
Miss Greeby had in every possible way offered herself for the post, but
Lambert had never cared for her sufficiently to endure the thought of
passing through life with her beside him. He said she was "a good sort";
and when a man says that of a woman, she may be to him a good friend, or
even a platonic chum, but she can never be a desirable wife in his eyes.
What Miss Greeby lacked was sex, and lacking that, lacked everything. It
wa