The truth was that they had arrived, simultaneously, at the third stage of their knowledge of each other. The first had been her breathless reverence for him, the messenger from her dead brother, the worn young visitant from another world, and his dazed recognition of her warm and vital beauty; next--when they had come together on Aleck’s bridge and in the fortnight following--she had made him into a saint and fairy prince and lover, and he--his senses smitten with loveliness, his returning strength and virility leaping to meet hers, leaning on it, mingling with it; now they were regarding each other quite clearly, with detachment. She saw a rather pale and precise young man, obviously out of drawing in her landscape, and he saw a highly colored and careless young woman who fitted so snugly into the rough western picture that he doubted the possibility of ever seeing her against a different background. For a little space they were painstakingly gentle with each other; then, mysteriously, irritations sprang at them out of thin air. If it made Ginger impatient to find him clumsy and inept at the things of her world, it jarred increasingly upon him to have her say, “It sure does look like we’re going to have a scorcher,” to find her utterly blank about books and plays and music. In her milder moods it seemed as if he might beguile her into reading, but the question of where to begin appalled him. It was not what she should read, but what she should have read. It was all summed up in that one sentence--the empty lack which he found in her. In her swiftly melting moods of tenderness, when she gave up a ride to stay with him in the cool old _adobe_, closed against the hot air from eight o’clock in the morning, after the California tradition, she was singularly unsatisfactory as a companion, what time she was not in his arms. He discovered exactly why this was the case. She might pull off her jingling spurs and fling aside her Stetson and come into the big living room and sit down, and stay docilely for an hour or more--but her _mind_ never came indoors. That was it. She might sit as softly as her Valdés great-grandmother in Sevilla, but her whole preoccupation was with the vigorous world outside.