"By no means; because it's just in dreams----!" But she pulled herself up. "I mean that their strangeness is their law. _They_, when they're happy, arrange everything to perfection. With you or without you at any rate," she pursued, "mine will go on. They'll be as fantastic as you please--that is as much about the poor product." She held him for a moment with this, then she broke out: "How shall we ever know his possibility unless we give him a chance? What I'm dying to see is the best we can turn out quite by ourselves." He sacrificed his indifference. "The best young man?" "Oh I don't care how old he is----" "So long as he's young!" Poor Pendrel--for want of anything better to do--interrupted. But she held her course. "The older he is the more he'll have given us time to see. Of course," she splendidly added, "he may be a failure, and, if he is, that will more or less settle the question. We're nowhere till it _is_ settled." Ralph showed on his side no less noble a patience. "But isn't it settled by the cowboy?" "The cowboy?" she stared. "Why isn't he what you want, and why isn't he good enough? He sometimes in spite of his calling, I believe, lives to a great age. There are cases surely in which he will have given you time to see, and he has the great merit of standing there ready to your hand. You talk about the 'question,' but what is he but the best answer to it that any conditions at all conceivable can yield? You say mine--my conditions--are wrong; so that what are his, logically, unless right? If he isn't right _with_ them it would seem therefore their fault. I wonder it doesn't strike you in fine that if he isn't good enough your idea itself perhaps isn't." Now that Ralph was launched he felt the tide high. "That's what it comes to, your idea, dress it up as you will. You want a fellow only who shall have had adventures--and that, I hasten to grant, is any lady's right. There's no disputing about tastes, but that isn't true about principles. You want the adventure to have been, or necessarily to be, of the species most marked and determined by our climate, our geographical position, our political institutions, our social circumstances and our national character. It seems to me you see lines drawn remarkably sharp, but, allowing you that, I repeat that you strike me as having but to take your choice. The cow-boy," he suggested, "of middle-age, say----" But she had now interrupted--as if for commiseration. "I don't even yet know what a cowboy is!"