Redfield rose and followed his landlady behind the counter, and there sat in earnest conversation while she made change. The tone in which her mother addressed the Supervisor, her action of touching him as one man lays hand upon another, was profoundly revealing to Lee Virginia. She revolted from it without realizing exactly what it meant; and feeling deeply but vaguely the forest ranger's sympathy, she asked: "How _can_ you endure this kind of life?" "I can't, and I don't," he answered, cautiously, for they were being closely observed. "I am seldom in town; my dominion is more than a mile above this level. My cabin is nine thousand feet above the sea. It is clean and quiet up there." "Are all the other restaurants in the village like this?" "Worse. I come here because it is the best." She rose. "I can't stand this air and these flies any longer. They're too disgusting." He followed her into the other house, conscious of the dismay and bitterness which burst forth the instant they were alone. "What am I to do? She is my mother, but I've lost all sense of relationship to her. And these people--except you and Mr. Redfield--are all disgusting to me. It isn't because my mother is poor, it isn't because she's keeping boarders; it's something else." At this point her voice failed her. The ranger, deeply moved, stood helplessly silent. What could he say? He knew a great deal better than she the essential depravity of her mother, and he felt keenly the cruelty of fate which had plunged a fine young spirit into this swamp of ill-smelling humanity. "Let us go out into the air," he suggested, presently. "The mountain wind will do you good." She followed him trustfully, and as she stepped from the squalor of the hotel into the splendor of the morning her head lifted. She drank the clear, crisp wind as one takes water in the desert. "The air is clean, anyway," she said. Cavanagh, to divert her, pointed away to the mountains. "There is my dominion. Up there I am sole ruler. No one can litter the earth with corruption or poison the streams." She did not speak, but as she studied the ranger her face cleared. "It _is_ beautiful up there." He went on. "I hate all this scrap-heap quite as heartily as you do, but up there is sweetness and sanity. The streams are germless, and the forest cannot be devastated. That is why I am a ranger. I could not endure life in a town like this." He turned up the street toward the high hill to the south, and she kept step with him. As she did not speak, he asked: "What did you expect to do out here?" "I hoped to teach," she replied, her voice still choked with her emotion. "I expected to find the country much improved." "And so it is; but it is still a long way from an Eastern State. Perhaps you will find the people less savage than they appear at first glance."