It amused Rod to speculate on how his father and Grove, the Deanes, Walls, Richstons, _et al_ would fare if they were ever faced with a situation in which they would have to black their own boots, prepare and serve their own food, wear overalls instead of tailored clothes. They couldn't. That was his cynical conclusion. They wouldn't know how. And they had an attitude which could only be translated as contempt for those who did know how. Somehow, by the grace of God, or chance, or skilful management, they had become entrenched behind material fortifications, their hands grasping the strings of an ample purse. And from behind these fortifications they looked out with narrowed eyes upon lesser folk. That, it struck Rod all in a heap, was the thing that confronted Mary Thorn when he talked to her of love and marriage. She had grasped the essence of class distinctions. She doubted his--their--power to overcome an idée fixé. Whereupon he straightway hunted up the place where she boarded and haled her forth to a show and afterward to supper in the Exeter Grill, where he was most likely to encounter some of his own crowd. His cogitations had put him in a defiant mood. He would show them. He looked across the table into her eyes and wondered if she had always been as keenly aware of the invisible fences about him as he was fast becoming himself. Well, he promised himself lightly, some of those fences were due to be smashed. CHAPTER XII Isabel Wall, the pert and pretty sister-in-law of Mr. Grove Norquay, became at last the cause of Rod's first definite breach in the fences. When summer full-blown came tripping on the heels of spring, Rod left the Valdez camp for good. It had been a wholesome experience. One year in the woods had shown him quite fully the technique of big timber operations. It had shed an unreckoned light, moreover, upon the nature and mental processes of the men who handled the timber, which Rod was sure seldom appeared to the owners of the woods as a matter of any particular importance. He knew himself duly qualified as a practical logger. He was egotist enough to believe himself more capable of getting results without friction than most logging bosses. But he had not set out to qualify in timber so much as to get outside the shell of his class and see how and why man in general functioned both in and out of industry. He had covered the first phase that occurred to him. His own individual job, his book, began to nag him again, to assume form, proportion, to cry out for embodiment. So he laid aside calked boots and Mackinaws for canvas shoes and flannels, and took up the pleasant ways of Hawk's Nest when June brought the first coho salmon into the rapids and a chair in the shade was a comfortable thing.