“Now I’ll tell you who I am, so that you will be better able to celebrate properly with me--and then for the glands. I’m dying to learn all about glands. Could you rejuvenate me, Doctor Shonto? Now’s your chance for that pretty birthday speech!” “I think,” said Shonto, with his grave smile, “that you, Mrs. Reemy, are a far more successful rejuvenator right now than I shall ever be. I’ve sloughed off five years since entering your door.” “Better! That was extremely well done. And now let’s get down to business: “I am Charmian Reemy, aged twenty-two to-day. I was born in San Francisco, and live there now. When I was seventeen I was married to Walter J. Reemy, a mining man from Alaska. To be absolutely frank, that marriage was the result of a plot by my father and mother to marry me off to a wealthy man. And I was too young and pliable to put up a decent fight. “I went to Alaska with my husband, where we lived two years. He was killed in a gambling game, and his will left everything to me. I sold out his Alaska mining property and returned to the United States, where I lived with my parents in San Francisco until both were taken away in the recent flu epidemic. “Since then I have been alone except for Mary Temple, who was with me in Alaska. She had returned to San Francisco with me after Walter’s death. So when I was left entirely alone again I hunted her up, and she has been my companion and housekeeper ever since. “When I was little I was what is generally called a misunderstood child. Whether that was true or not I can’t say, but I know that, almost from my earliest remembrance, my home life was unpleasant. My parents were plodders in the footsteps of Tradition. At an early age I showed radical tendencies. “I am a radical to-day. I am intolerant of all the intolerance of this generation of false prophets. I come up here to forget man’s stupidity. And I call my retreat in the big-timber country The Throne of Tolerance. Wait until to-morrow morning. Then, if you can look from those west windows and be intolerant of anything or anybody, you don’t belong to my clan. “I make pilgrimage to El Trono de Tolerancia whenever I begin to choke up down in San Francisco. Mary Temple and I live simply up here in the woods until the suffocation passes, then we return to the city--and boredom. I learned to love the outdoors up in Alaska. And sometime I’m going on a great adventure. I’m going to some far-off place where man never before has set his foot. And maybe I shan’t come back.