“It’s a funny little New York factory city with very staid ways,” she said. “You go to a dance at the country club every Saturday night and to tea parties and things in between. You fight, bleed and die for your social position and once in a while you stop and wonder why.… It’s a bore. You can see yourself going on doing the same thing till the day of your death.…” Her discontent with things as they are found ready sympathy. “That’s just the way it is here,” he said with conviction. “You can’t see anything ahead.” “Oh, I don’t think its the same here at all,” she protested. “This country’s so big and interesting. It’s different.” “Tell me how,” he demanded. “I haven’t seen anything interesting here since I got back,—except you.” She ignored the exception. “I can’t express it exactly. The people here are just like people everywhere else—most of them. But the country looks so big and unoccupied. And blue mountains are so alluring. There might be anything beyond them … adventures, opportunities.…” This idea was a bit too rarefied for Ramon, but he could agree about the mountains. “It’s a fine country,” he assented. “For those that own it.” “It’s just a feeling I have about it,” she went on, trying to express her own half-formulated idea. “But then I have that feeling about life in general, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in it. I mean the feeling that it’s full of thrilling things, but somehow you miss them all.” “I have felt something like that,” he admitted. “But I never could say it.” This discovery of an idea in common seemed somehow to bring them closer together. His hand tightened gently about her arm; almost unconsciously he drew her toward him. But she seemed to be all absorbed in the discussion. “You have no right to complain,” she told him. “A man can do something about it.” “Yes,” he agreed, speaking a reflection without stopping to put it in conventional language. “It must be hell to be a woman … excuse me … I mean.…” “Don’t apologize. It is—just that. A man at least has a fighting chance to escape boredom. But they won’t even let a woman fight. I wish I were a man.” “Well; I don’t,” he asserted with warmth, unconsciously tightening his hold upon her arm. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re a woman.” “Oh, are you?” She looked up at him with challenging, provocative eyes. For an instant a kiss was imminent. It hovered between them like an invisible fairy presence of which they both were sweetly aware, and no one else. “Hey there! all you spooners!” came a jovial and irreverent voice from the vicinity of the camp fire. “Come and eat.”