She listened with some surprise. The same detail had held her gaze, the same thought--almost the same simile--had come into her mind; but she had hardly expected to find a love of the beautiful in this bronzed forester. In fact, she found that a number of her preconceived ideas were being turned topsy-turvy. Heretofore, it seemed to her, her thought had always dwelt on the superficialities rather than the realities of life. Her income was pitifully small according to her standards, yet she had never had to consider the question of food and shelter. She had known social success, love of beauty and of art, gayety and luxury; she had had petty discouragements and triumphs, worries and fears, but of the simple and primitive basis of things she took no cognizance. She had never dealt with essentials. They had always seemed outside her life. Virginia had never lived in the shadow of Fear,--that greatest and most potent of realities. In truth she didn't know the meaning of the word. She had been afraid in her bed at night, she had been apprehensive of a block's walk in the twilight, but Fear--in its true sense--was an alien and a stranger. She had never met him in the waste places, seen him skulking on her trail through the winter snows, listened to his voice in the wind's wail. She didn't know the fear of which the coyotes sang from this hill, the blind and groping dread of an immutable destiny, the ghastly realization of impotence against a cruel and omnipotent fate. She hadn't ever learned about it. Living a protected life she didn't know that it existed. Food and shelter and warmth and safety had always seemed her birthright; about her house marched the officers of the law protecting her from evildoers; she lived in sight of great hospitals that would open their doors to the sick and injured and of charitable institutions that would clothe and feed the needy: thus the world had kept its bitter truths from her. But she was beginning to learn them now. She was having her first glimpse of life, life stripped of all delusion, stark and naked, the relentless reality that it was. Fear was no stranger to these forests. Its presence, in every turn of the trail, filled her with awe. A single misstep, a little instant of hesitation in a crisis, might precipitate her a thousand feet down the canyon to her death. Dead trees swayed, threatening to fall; snow slides roared and rumbled on the far steeps; the quagmire sucked with greedy lips, the trail wandered dimly,--as if it were trying to decoy her away into the fastnesses where the wilderness might claim her. No one had to tell her how easy it would be to lose the trail, never to find it again. The forests were endless; there were none to hear a wanderer's cry for help. Wet matches, an accident to the food supplies, a few nights without shelter in the dismal forest,--any of these might spell complete and irrevocable disaster.