Fred agreed to this; he readily visualized Phil tramping 'cross-country in snowstorms. "It's an awful thing," Phil resumed, "to have to be respectable. Aunt Kate wants to go South this winter and take me with her. But that would mean being shut up in a hotel. If daddy didn't have to work, I'd make him take me to California where we could get a wagon and just keep camping. Camping out is the most fun there is in _this_ world. There's a nice wooziness in waking up at night and hearing an owl right over your head; and there are the weather changes, when you go to sleep with the stars shining and wake up and hear the rain slapping the tent. And when you've gone for a long tramp and come back tired and wet and hungry, and sit and talk about things awhile and then tumble into bed and get up in the morning to do it all over again--! Does that sound perfectly wild? If it does, then I'm crazy, for that's the kind of thing I like--not to talk about it at parties in my best clothes, but to go out and do it and keep on doing it forever and ever." She put the last crumb of the Bartlett cake into her mouth meditatively. "I like the outdoors, too," said Fred, for whom this statement of her likings momentarily humanized his goddess and brought her within the range of his understanding. "The earth is a good old earth. There are no jars in the way she does her business. There's something that makes me feel sort o' funny inside when I go out now and see that little wheat-patch of mine, and know that the snow is going to cover it, and that with any kind of good luck it's going to live right through the cold and come to harvest next summer. And it gives me a queer feeling, and always did, the way it all goes on--and has always gone on since the beginning of the world. When I was a little boy here in Montgomery and went to Center Church Sunday-School, the most interesting things in the Bible were about those Old Testament people, raising cattle and tending flocks and farming just like the people right here at home. I suppose it's a feeling like that I always had that makes me want to be a farmer and live close to the ground--that and wanting to earn a living," he concluded, smiling. He was astonished at his own speech, which had expressed ideas that had never crystallized in his mind before. "That," said Phil, "is what poetry is--feeling like that." "I suppose it is," Fred assented. The waiters were relieving the guests of their burdens, and carrying out the tables, and there was a stir through the house as the musicians took their places. Phil rose and nodded to a young gentleman who sought her for the next dance. "I've got to go," said Fred. "I'll just about catch my last car. It's been fine to be here. And I've enjoyed talking to you. It was mighty kind of you to sit up here with me. I shall always remember it." Phil was drawing on her gloves, looking down upon the hall through which the guests from the other rooms were now passing.