Tame her! Felix remembered suddenly the conversation he had had with Rose-Ann at their restaurant rendezvous.... Rose-Ann’s father sighed. “I’ve never tried....” “Neither have I,” said Felix. “It might be worth while!” Rose-Ann’s father looked at him quizzically, and for the first time Felix felt in his kindly smile the cynical quality which Rose-Ann had referred to more than once. Rose-Ann’s father shook his head. “You’re too much like me,” he said. “I’m her husband, confound it,” said Felix, jumping up. “Where is my hat?” Rose-Ann’s father regarded him sympathetically. “You won’t stay to breakfast?” he said. “Well—good luck, young man!” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ LXII. Theory and Practice 1 AT the end of the second day out on the Santa Fe, Felix had begun to leave winter behind; the desert was blossoming with strange white and scarlet flowers; and the next morning he rode past orange-groves golden with fruit and white with bloom, and quaint little rose-gardens at the way-stations, toward that purple infinite depth along the horizon which began to lift itself into the white peaks of a mountain range. Felix had been vaguely aware that the climate of southern California was supposed to differ from that of the Great Lakes, but to be riding out of a world of ice and snow straight into the heart of spring, seemed to him at once miraculous and auspicious. The green and gold of this new world was significant to him not as a fact of geography, but as a magical response of nature to his heart’s impatience. It was a promise of happiness. Felix was in need of some such happy auspice to hearten him. The determination with which he had started out had been undermined by two days and nights of solitary thought. Sometimes he felt like a martyr going to the stake; and sometimes like a fool. But he was upheld by a theory. It was the latest of all his theories concerning life in general and himself and Rose-Ann in particular; and he had resolved to act upon that theory at all costs, no matter how absurd it might at any moment seem. His theory was this: that he and Rose-Ann were married....