"Dinners," she returned flippantly. "Heavens! I've had enough of nature for one evening. How perfectly melancholy! But what do they remind you of?" "I 'm in a reminiscent mood," he confessed. "I can never hear the frogs trilling in the night without being reminded of the marshlands around my native town in the Middle West. Every night, all summer long, I could hear that symphony through the open windows of my room, and because I was then in the adventurous and romantic period of youth, the recurrence of the sound brings back an echo of old emotions. I feel as if I were being called upon to go out into the world and seek my fortune." "Have you been back there lately?" she asked. "How does it seem to revisit the home of your childhood after having had adventures, and after having done something in the world? I 've never had any home but this, I 've never travelled except for pleasure, and I 've never accomplished anything." Leigh lifted his head and laughed, but the laugh was not altogether a happy one. "You present me to myself in a new light," he answered. "So far I have only accomplished the feat of reaching the first rung of the ladder which I used to think I would have climbed by this time. But yes, I have been back there recently, and found everything changed. In fact, the West is a symbol of mutation. The marshlands have been filled in; streets extend across the places where I used to go for cat-tails; they have no more batrachian concerts there now. The only reminder of that earlier characteristic of the place is a huge green frog worked out in a marble mosaic on the floor of the new court house. That is the seal of my native town." By mere accident Leigh had made that first important step in love's progress; he had succeeded in arousing a personal interest. "It's quite charming," she commented, "and not lacking in an element of poetry, either." "Poetry," he echoed, inspired by her appreciation. "It's just those apparently common things that are so full of it, but the poets don't see it, or else they don't quite dare to give it expression. The conventions of the art are too overpowering. Take the railroad train, for example, which stands to most of us for convenience combined with a certain measure of discomfort. There 's nothing more stimulating to the imagination than the whistle of a locomotive in the distance at night, though perhaps only the poor, to whom travel is a luxury, appreciate to the full its invitation and the suggestion of adventure. Working up from one stratum to another through difficulties, they are attended by a growing wonder as the world expands before them. But to have all experiences open to you from the first by the power of wealth, such as travel and theatres, for example, is the real misfortune of birth. The curiosity of the rich is gratified before it is stimulated by denial. Then what is left to them?" "Ennui," she answered simply.