"Ah. If you found yourself cut off from a great many things you unconsciously value; deprived of things you've accepted as your birthright, you'd begin to change your tune, I think. You wouldn't be human if you didn't," Mary commented. "Anyway, that isn't all, and you know it isn't, Rod," she broke out with unexpected heat. "I'm not so sure as you are that marriage is an end in itself. It's just a step. Probably instinct tends to drive a man and a woman into each other's arms. It seems so. But I can see things ahead of us in such a step that I rather shrink from. And what is just as important, I happen also to see things ahead of me that I rather anticipate, things I want to try and do. I want--oh, what's the use, Rod? We don't get anywhere talking about this. Why can't we just be friends and let it go at that?" "Could you be just friends with me now?" he challenged. And when the girl's fundamental truthfulness brought a thoughtful look and a touch of color to her face Rod was answered without words. It was like swimming upstream, he thought to himself, halting on his way to look down on the tide roaring and foaming through its narrow passage by Little Dent. Manhood wasn't proving quite the careless easy way of his youthful fancy. It had sometimes seemed to him then, with preternatural vision for a boy, that for well-born people the chief trouble lay not in getting things they wanted, but in wanting anything much. His life had seemed to him then a matter of absolute certainties. And it wasn't. Not by a long shot. He wanted Mary Thorn. He wanted very much to write brilliantly and acceptably about his native land, which he loved for its bigness and rugged beauty as well as for what it had so generously bestowed on him and his. He could neither have one nor accomplish the other. But he would! Oh, yes. He pursed his lips and set his teeth upon that determination, as he lingered on the ridge where the old trail pitched down to the Granite Fool on one side and the new one slanted to the camp at tidewater.