The door of the dining-room stood open, and, when I had finished my pipe, I joined the ranchman’s wife, who sat beside the table in a rocking-chair, holding in her arms her oldest child, a boy of five or six. She seemed glad to have someone to talk to. The conversation at table had swept from end to end in a manner diverting to her, but in which she as little dreamed of joining as a bird would venture with untried wings into a high wind. She was too delicately reared to be at home in the thickening tobacco-smoke of the living-room and so she was alone with the child, the hired woman being in the kitchen. I praised the country side which she and her husband had chosen as their home, and told her how well it contrasted with a region only a few miles to the north; but, if I found a way to her heart at all, it was in genuine admiration of the boy, whose light hair rested in moist curls about his glowing face, as he lay sleeping in his mother’s arms. She was not a discontented woman—far from it; she was young, and her eyes shone with health and with vital interest in the things about her. But it was rarely that she saw anyone from the world outside, and I was a stranger, and when I owned to having been in the Northwest, she told me eagerly that her own people and her husband’s lived “back east in Minnesota,” where they both were born and bred. How can I suggest the pathos of it? She was not complaining and yet, as she went on telling me of an earlier time, it was almost as a captive might have spoken of the wide range of living when he was free. Life in constant contact with her friends and the breadth of their many interests was in such striking contrast to existence on a ranch, with the nearest neighbor thirty miles in the offing, and with never a look from year to year over the rugged hills that formed the horizon. One could see at a glance the opposite effects of the change upon the two natures. Her husband, native-born and country-bred, like herself, and schooled as a man must be whose bringing up is in a community which draws its blood and traditions pure from New England, yet had become more a frontiersman every year, in whom the memories of earlier things faded fast before the dominant realities of his new surroundings. She, on the contrary, cherished these memories of her own—her home and friends and church associations and Chautauqua circle (she told me particularly of that) until they were enshrined within her, and one could but see that, however loneliness might oppress her, she had an escape which must have furnished at times an enjoyment keener, perhaps, than any which real experience would have brought.