Again Philip shook his head. “I’m not at all sure that I want to grab the world by the neck, Harry. That doesn’t seem like much of an ambition to me.” “All right; say it doesn’t. What then?” “Oh, I don’t know. If the miracle had happened a year or so ago ... but it didn’t; so what’s the use?” “Go on and turn it loose,” Bromley encouraged. “Set the clock back a year or so and let us see what it strikes.” “I had a few ideals then; modest ones, I guess you’d call them. I’d had to break my college course in the third year--family matters. At that time I wanted nothing so much as to go back and finish; and perhaps have a try for a Ph.D. degree afterward.” “And past that?” “More of what you’d call the modesties, I guess: a teaching job in some college back home, or something of that sort; a job in which I’d have some leisure for reading, thinking my own thoughts, living my own life.” “No wife and kiddies in the picture?” Bromley asked, with his most disarming smile. “No; not then.” The play-boy laughed softly. “No sentimental foolishness for the austere young student and pedagogue, of course. But the ‘not then’ tells a different story. You’ve met the incomparable ‘her’ in your later avatar?” It was some measure of the distance he had come on the road to freer human expression that Philip did not at once retreat into the speechless reticences. “Yes,” he said: “I’ve met a girl.” “The ‘angel’ you spoke of, the night you fed a hungry hold-up?” “Don’t get it wrong. She is not so angelic that she can’t be perfectly human.” “But didn’t you say you’d met her only twice?” “I did; and the saying still holds true.” “Bowled you over like a shot, did she? I’d never have believed it of you, Philip.” “You needn’t believe it now. There was no ‘bowling over’ about it. I first met her on the train coming to Denver--with her family; sat with her for part of an afternoon. She isn’t like any other girl I’ve ever known.” “And that is as far as you’ve gone? You are a cold-blooded fish, Philip, dear. But we were talking about futures. I take it the teaching job in a New England college doesn’t appeal to you now; or won’t if our mine keeps its promise?” “Honestly, Harry, I can’t see very far ahead. I’m not at all sure that I want to go back and finish my college course. There is nothing truer than the saying we have hurled at us all the time out here--that the West lays hold of a man and refuses to let go; that you may be as homesick as the devil, but you’ll never go home to stay. But this is all dream stuff--this talk. We haven’t got the millions yet. Even if the mine is as rich as it seems to be, we may find jumpers in possession, and so many of them that we can’t get away with them.” “That’s so. ‘There’s many a slip,’ as we read in the copy-books.”