"Oh, shucks!" laughed the man. "Here, give me the paper! Now--head it like this: 'I, Esther Davidson, spinster, _æt._ thirty years and a few minutes over, do hereby promise and attest that no matter how unwilling to die I may be when my time comes, I shall, at least, not feel that life has defrauded me if I have succeeded in achieving and possessing the following brief list of experiences and substances.' There!" he finished triumphantly. "Now do you see how easy and business-like it all is? Just the plainest possible rating of the things you'd like to have before you're willing to die." Cautiously Esther Davidson took the paper from his hand and scanned it with slow-smiling eyes. "The--things--I'd--like to have--before I'm--willing--to--die," she mused indolently. Then suddenly into her placid face blazed an astonishing flame of passion that vanished again as quickly as it came. "My God!" she said. "The things I've _got_ to have before I'm willing to die!" Stretching the little paper taut across her knees, she began to scribble hasty, impulsive words and phrases, crossing and recrossing, making and erasing, now frowning fiercely down on the unoffending page, now staring off narrow-eyed and smilingly speculative into the blue-green spruce tops. It was almost ten minutes before she spoke again. Then: "How do you spell amethyst?" she asked meditatively. The man gave a groan of palpable disgust. "Oh, I say," he reproached her. "You're not playing fair! This was to be a really _bona fide_ statement you know." Without looking up the young woman lifted her hand and gesticulated across the left side of her mannish, khaki-colored flannel shirt. "Cross my heart!" she affirmed solemnly. "This is a perfectly 'honest-injun' list!" Then she tore up everything she had written and began all over again, astonishingly slowly, astonishingly neatly, on a fresh sheet of paper. "Of course, at first," she explained painstakingly, "you think there are just about ten thousand things that you've simply got to have, but when you really stop to sort them out, and pick and choose a bit, and narrow them all down to actual essentials; narrow them all down to just the 'Passions of the Soul,' as it were, why, then, there really aren't so many after all! Only one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight," she counted on her fingers. "At first, for instance," she persisted frankly, "it seemed to me that I could never, never die happy until I had possessed a very large--oh, I mean an inordinately large amethyst brooch that simply wallowed in pearls, but honestly now as a real treasure-trove, I can see that I'd infinitely rather be able to remember that once upon a time I'd--stroked a lion's face; just one, long, slow, soft-furred, yellow stroke from the browny-pink tip of his nose to the extremest shaggy end of his mane--and he hadn't bitten me!" "My Heavens!" gasped the man. "Are you crazy? What kind of a list have you been making out anyway?"