Rod didn't attempt to account for this. He hadn't cast a sentimental halo about her. His pulse did not quicken when he thought of her. He simply remembered her vividly as a girl he knew and liked better than all the rest. The nearest he came to an analysis of the "why" was to wonder if it were not because he remembered Mary in her look and words, in her person and manner, as supremely natural. He had an ingrained dislike for the artificial. He had been born with that predisposition. So had Phil. He liked to think that was a Norquay characteristic. And the generation of girls and young women Rod knew seemed like exotic flowers,--with their lipsticks and powder, their exaggeration of speech, their startling frankness. They were easy to admire. Upon occasion their provocative sex might trumpet a challenge. But in the main rouge and talcum, pert slang, the assurance of complete sophistication amused Rod without greatly interesting him. He took it for granted Mary would be at home. But the Thorn world had moved as well as his own. He found Oliver Thorn sitting on the porch looking over a newspaper. They shook hands. Mrs. Thorn came out to greet him. And freshly she impressed Rod with a sense of serenity, of kindliness, of a motherly quality he could not remember in his own life. "Where's Mary?" he asked. "Still in town. She'll be home soon, though, I hope. She cut a year in high school and entered the U.B.C. last summer," Mrs. Thorn told him. "She's quite grown up, Rod. I don't believe you'd know her. She's changed, like you." "But I don't think I've changed much," Rod demurred. "Of course you wouldn't see it yourself, but I can," Mrs. Thorn smiled. She went back into the house. Rod sat talking to Thorn. Trout-fishing, the salmon run, timber, matters current along the B.C. coast. Westward of the float a set of boomsticks enclosed a floating mass of fresh-cut cedar in four-foot lengths, split to a size,--shingle bolts for the mills. Oliver Thorn had owned for years a square mile of the finest timber on Valdez; magnificent fir close-ranked on the ridges, cool groves of cedar in shadowy lowlands. He held it indefeasibly, under a Crown grant. Rod knew that because he had once heard his father and Grove comment impatiently on the man's clear title, and wonder why in his circumstances he would neither sell nor cut the timber himself. Grove had observed caustically that some one had blundered. That particular stretch of woods was almost surrounded by the Norquay holdings. His father had merely shrugged his shoulders. Rod wondered idly now why a poor man did not turn those trees into useful cash. He uttered a modification of this thought. Thorn smiled.