They were both learning swiftly the art of loving, but, though one goes far in the first sensational lessons, one can not go all the way, no matter how reckless is the attempt. Passion has to be adjusted to tenderness, and affection to experience, or there is discord. For her, perhaps, that love held more of faery, more freshness and delicious abandon, more mystery, for her nerves had never been dulled by contact; but for him there were newer and truer wonders as well. He had taken another degree in sentiment, and the initiation was as marvelous for him, an apprentice, as for her, a neophyte. And, in that sacred, secret lodge, when the time came, she would jump in a single intuitive moment to his level and surpass him. Already she was tuned to the emotional pitch; she would notice every false move, every mistake in his devotion, as well as if she had been with him past-master in the rites of love. She could already teach him, and already she began to hold him back sensitively, to linger over every transient mood of feeling, every minor phase which women, in that stage between wooing and winning, so care to taste to the last sweet drop. Every reflex, every echo, she would bid him answer to, indefinitely prolonging, now that she was sure of him, the fineness of the reward of her moment, delaying the definite end. He had taught her the rapture of a caress—she would teach him the excitement of a smile, a tone, a gesture. They lingered long at the table and then went forth into the sun. The cable-car carried them, still bantering, to the gate of the Presidio, and they set out rollicking across the golf-links. The open downs stretched in front of them in long, sweeping lines, like the ground swells of the sea, skirted to the north by groves of cypress and eucalyptus trees. Beyond, to the west, the ground grew sandy as it approached the ocean, and from that direction a sea-breeze sailed, salt and strong. Behind them was Lone Mountain, with its huge cross on top, and from there in a scattering quadrant a multitude of little houses, the outskirts of the city, skirmished towards the park. The turf was hard and smooth as a carpet, burned, here and there, in patches of black, but elsewhere of a pastel green, colored by the hardier weeds that had sustained the drought and fought their way through the matted, sunburned stalks of dry grass.