“Well, the taboo operates even more powerfully to prevent any friendships between the villagers and us ravine-folk. Our young men haven’t got any money or automobiles, and the village girls don’t know how to talk about art. I don’t know why that should make such a difference, but it seems to. Besides, we hardly ever meet them. We don’t go to the local dances; and when we go in swimming, we go up the Lake to some place where we don’t have to wear bathing suits. The only young woman in the village with whom we are likely to exchange a dozen words in as many weeks is the daughter of the man who owns one of the cars that meet people at the station, and who occasionally drives us home herself. “But, after all,”—he paused, and blew a cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling, “even Woods Point is part of the modern world. Anything can happen there. It’s not impossible that a girl should be born in Woods Point who went to the public library and got hold of Shaw and Galsworthy and H. G. Wells, and dreamed of going to Chicago and getting a job and living her own life—and yet who, being a girl, stayed on in Woods Point.” “Yes,” said Felix, “I can understand that.” “I can’t,” said Rose-Ann. “How old was she?” “Nineteen.” “Well—go on,” said Rose-Ann. “Perhaps I’m wrong.” “That girl,” said Clive, “wouldn’t be particularly interested in the summer boarders. But she would be interested in the writers and artists out on the edge of the ravines. She would hear the gossip about their ‘queer doin’s’”—he smiled, and looked at Rose-Ann—“about how they run around in the snow without a stitch of clothes on! for instance....” “Goodness!” said Rose-Ann, “who could have seen me?” “Us village folks hears about everything that’s goin’ on!” said Clive. “Well—this girl would hear about these crazy artists, and their crazy talk, and their crazy parties—and she would feel that she understood these people, that she belonged among them. But she would never have talked to a living soul about the things that interested her. She would be inarticulate. And if any of these artists or writers had talked to her for a passing moment, they would never have guessed that she was anything but what she seemed—a village girl. “She might see a good deal of these people, first and last. She might be the girl who drove them home from the station in her father’s car, who came for them after midnight at the end of one of their crazy parties. And none of them would ever guess—why should he?—that the girl who honked the horn impatiently for them out in the road, would go home and read ‘Man and Superman’ in bed, and then cry herself to sleep.