This kitchen mood of Peg's--and somehow I liked it as much as ever she did--and her word for it how she preferred cookery to balls, set me to put questions as we twined along our path among the trees on homeward journey. The night, as Peg foretold when she so favored supper-getting, was full of a white radiance that one might read print by, for the air was as clear as glass and the moon both big and round. “You were speaking as one weary,” said I, “of dance and reception, and declared how you would sooner cook. Now that puts me in a fog; I should have supposed you the happiest, as you should be the proudest, woman in the world.” “I said I would sooner cook for you,” said Peg. “You are uncouth enough to forget that part. Or perhaps, now it was your timidity. I am proud enough, doubtless; but why, watch-dog, should you think me happy?” “Is it not reason enough,” returned I, “that you have stifled your enemies, and stand on the last summit of our society?” “I am happy only as it makes my friends happy,” returned Peg; “the good General and yourself. I would not, for my own part, waste one moment on it.” “I can not understand,” said I. “That I should love nothing of drawing-rooms does not amaze me; the day is on in middle life with me and I've seen too much of grass and sky to now care for floors and frescoes. But for a woman:--I should have said her joy would be there.” “Watch-dog, I am too much the woman,” said Peg; “or, since you may better understand, I'm too much the savage. I've climbed the social mountain. I stand on its summit; there is nowhere higher. And yet what will it all mean?” “What will it not mean?” I asked. “Watch-dog, I'll tell you what it will not mean.” Peg spoke in a tone of tired earnestness. “It will not mean sympathy or love or trust. Society, as we've agreed, is like a mountain. And like a mountain, you find less and less of vegetation as you climb--fewer of the green, good virtues that stand so thickly rank in the poor valleys below. As you climb, it would turn ever barer and colder; and at the last no virtues--nothing but lichens and livid mosses. We are at the summit, watch-dog. And now what find we other than the dead cold snow? You have told me I stand on the social summit; you see I keep repeating. Do you know now what it is in my heart to do? There lies no peril of a slip; I have too much the sure foot of the ibex. Do you know what I am moved to do?--me on my high snow social peak? Why, then, dash myself into that common valley far below.” “Now, that is not our Peg who speaks,” cried I, not a trifle put about by Peg's Alpine parables. “It is the talk of a tongue and means mere wildness.”