Then he would have watched her face for full five minutes in its varying lights as she turned about in ecstasy at the sublime panorama, the sunlight falling on her cheeks with their heightened colour from her climb, the wind blowing a lock of hair across her temple. He would have enjoyed for a while her outcry of delight as she saw and recognized the miniature presentment of now a familiar village, now a lake, before he jumped up beside her, clasped her in his arms and both turned about from north to east to south to west together, and together drank in the vitalizing air. He would be infinitely better able to tell her what to look at, than he was able when he was on the boulder and she two hundred feet below, to shout to her that he could see a hundred miles in every direction. And now he need not shout. He can whisper in her ears, between kisses on every part of her head and neck, the joy of both of them, and can listen to her murmuring endearments she never otherwise would have thought of uttering. § 124 This climax-capping boulder on the peak of Mt. Chocorua in New Hampshire has on its southeast side the six-foot sheer perpendicular up which he helped her first. On its northwest side it has a slope of some forty degrees up which they might have scrambled hand in hand and reached the utmost altitude simultaneously. But she will be much better pleased and admire his restraint forever, if he not only keeps her ahead of him all the long trail up the mountain but finally lifts her up ahead of him, up the steep side at the southeast and (with her pardonable childish satisfaction, which well becomes her but ill becomes him) lets her, on this mountain-climbing experience, be his superior in this one little thing for these brief five minutes. During this time she will recover a bit from the sublimity of her position, will regain her breath, and will be able to turn her attention from the wonders of the mountain view, so that she too may have the pleasure of watching _his_ face and covering it with kisses when he has made his final upspringing to the highest physical altitude in the region. Ardent mountain climbers like this will not be satisfied until they have symbolically, so to speak, climbed Mt. Everest in the Himalayas. And these ascents, each with the other, will preclude their taking any interest in the company of other mountain climbers. No woman will want other company than that of her husband, no man will be able to find a more attractive companion than his wife. § 125