Suppose he did. A brave specimen, he, if he had the shameful egoism to ask a girl—a girl like Louise—a gentle, highbred, protected, cherished girl like that—to share this new, bleak, rough life with him. But the very sweetness of the thought of her doing it made him gasp there in the darkness. How stifling the air was! He lifted his hat. It was hard to breathe. It was like the still oppressiveness preceding an electrical storm. His mare, unguided, had naturally chosen the main travelled trail and kept it. She followed the mood of her master and walked leisurely along while the man wrestled with himself. If he really possessed the hardihood to ask Louise to do this for him, she would laugh at him. Stay! That was a lie—a black lie. She would not laugh—not Louise. She was not of that sort. Rather would she grieve over the inevitable sadness of it. If she laughed, he could bear it better—he had good, stubborn, self-respecting blood in him,—but she would not laugh. And all the rest of his long life must be spent in wishing—wishing—if it could have been! But he would never ask her to do it. Not even if the impossible came to pass. It was a hard country on women, a hard, treeless, sun-seared, unkindly country. Men could stand it—fight for its future; but not women like Louise. It made men as well as unmade them. And after all it did not prove to be the undoing of men so much as it developed in them the perhaps hitherto hidden fact that they were already wanting. These latent, constitutional weaknesses thus laid bare, the bad must for a while prevail—bad is so much noisier than good. But this big, new country with its infinite possibilities—give it time—it would form men out of raw material and make over men mistakenly made when that was possible, or else show the dividing line so clearly that the goats might not herd with the sheep. Some day, it would be fit for women—like Louise. Not now. Much labor and sorrow must be lived through; there must be many mistakes, many experiments tried, there must be much sacrifice and much refining, and many must fall and lose in the race before its big destiny be worked out and it be fit for women—like Louise. Down in the southern part of the State, and belonging to it, a certain big barred building sheltered many women, when the sun of the treeless prairies and the gazing into the lonesome distances surrounding their homesteads seeped into their brains and stayed there so that they knew not what they did. There were trees there and fountains and restful blue-grass in season, and flowers, flowers, flowers—but these came too late for most of the women.