"Why, even with grown people," she added hastily. "Did you ever know a marriage to turn out to be specially successful where the man had courted a reluctant woman for years and years before she finally yielded to him? It's perfectly astonishing how soon a wife like that is forced to mourn: 'Why did he court me so long and so furiously if he really cared as little as this? I'm just exactly the same person that I was in the beginning!'--Yes, that's precisely the trouble. In the long time that she has kept her man waiting, she has remained just exactly the same small object that she was in the beginning, but the man's hunger for her has materialized and spiritualized and idealized a thousandfold beyond her paltry capacity to satisfy it." "That's a funny way to look at it," mused Donas Guthrie. "Is it?" said the young woman, a trifle petulantly. "It doesn't seem funny to me!" Then to Guthrie's infinite astonishment and embarrassment the tears welled up suddenly into her eyes and she turned her head abruptly away and began to beat a nervous tattoo with one hand on the flimsy piazza railing. In the moment's awkward silence that ensued, the little inn's clattery kitchen wafted up its pleasant, odorous, noon-day suggestion of coffee and bacon. "W-h-e-w!" gloated Guthrie desperately, "but that smells good!" "It doesn't smell good to me," said the young woman tartly. With a definite thud the tilting leg of Guthrie's chair came whacking down on the piazza floor. "Why, you inconsistent little gourmand!" he exclaimed. "Then why did you give 'one perfectly good dinner' a place on your list of necessities?" "I don't know," whispered the young woman, a trifle tremulously. Then abruptly she burst out laughing, and the face that she turned to Guthrie again was all deliciously mussed up like a child's, with tears and smiles and breeze-blown wisps of hair. "That dinner item was just another silly thing," she explained half bashfully, half defiantly. "It's only that although I practically never eat much of anything on ordinary occasions, whenever I get into any kind of danger, whenever the train runs off the track, or the steamer threatens to sink, or my car gets stuck in the subway, I'm seized with the most terrific gnawing hunger--as though--as though--" Furiously the red flushed into her face again. "Well--eternity sounds so l-long," she stammered, "and I have a perfect horror, somehow--of going to Heaven--on an empty stomach." In mutual appreciation of a suddenly relaxed tension, the man's laughter and the woman's rang out together throughout the dooryard and startled a grazing pony into a whimpering whinny of sympathy. "I knew you'd think my list was funny," protested the young woman. "I knew perfectly well that every single individual item on it would astonish you." Meditatively Donas Guthrie refilled his pipe and evidently illuminated both the tobacco and the situation with the same match.