"I collect adventures because I am lonesome!" Her voice shook a little, but her eyes were frankly untroubled. "I collect adventures because the life that interests me doesn't happen to come to me, and I have to go out and search for it!--I'm companion all the year to a woman who doesn't know right from wrong in any dear, big sense, but who could define propriety and impropriety to you till your ears split. And all her friends are just like her. They haven't any mental muscle to them. It's just dress and etiquette, dress and etiquette, dress and etiquette! So I have to live all alone in my head, and think and think and think, till my poor brain churns and overlaps like a surf without any shore. Do you know what I mean? Then when my June vacation comes, I run right off to Rosedale and collect all the adventures I possibly can to take back with me for the long dreary year. Things to think about, you know, when I have to sit up at night giving medicine, or when I have to mend heavy black silk clothes, or when the dinners are so long that I could scream over the extra delay of a salad course. So I make June a sort of pranky, fancy-dress party for my soul. Do you know what I mean?" "Yes, I know what you mean," said the Man. "I know just what you mean. You mean you're eighteen. That's the whole of it. You mean that there's no fence to your pasture, no bottom to your cup, no crust to your bread. You mean that you can't sleep at night for the pounding of your heart. You mean most of all that there's no limit to your vision. You're inordinately keen after life. That's all. You'll get over it!" "_I won't get over it!_" There was fire in the Girl's eyes and she drew her breath sharply. "I say I _won't_ get over it! There's nothing on earth that could stale me! If I live to be a hundred I sha'n't wither!--why, how could I?" Buoyant, blooming, aquiver with startled emotions, she threw out her hands with a passionate gesture of protest. The Man shook his shoulders and jumped up. "Perhaps you're right," he muttered. "Perhaps you _are_ the kind that won't ever grow old. If you are--Heaven help you! Youth's nothing but a wound, anyway. Do you want to be a wound that never heals?" He laughed stridently. Then the Girl began to fumble through sudden tears at the buckles of her saddle. Her growing hunger and faintness and the heat of the day were telling on her. "You must think me a crazy fool," she confessed, "the way I have plunged into personalities. Why, I could go a whole year with an alien running-mate and never breathe a word or a sigh about myself, but with some people--the second you see them you know they are part of your chord. Chord is the only term in music that I understand, and I understand that as though I had made the word myself." She tried to laugh. "Now I'm going home! I've had a good time. You seem almost like a friend. I've never had a talky friend."