“Thanks. I feel complimented. It is the first time you’ve looked at _me_. Shorn of my dignity--no, my worldliness, do I begin well, desert man?... No more stuffy dresses clogging my feet! No more veils to protect my face! Let the sun burn! I want to work. I want to help. I want to learn. If madness must be mine, let it be a madness to learn what in this God-forsaken land ever made you the man you are. There, Sir Wansfell, I have flung down the gage.” “Very well,” replied Adam, soberly. “And now,” she continued, “I am eager to work. If I blunder, be patient. If I am stupid, make me see. And if I faint in the sun or fall beside the trail, remember it is my poor body that fails, and not my will.” So, in the light of her keen interest, Adam found the humdrum mixing of dough and the baking of bread a pleasure and a lesson to him, rather than a task. “Ah! how important are the homely things of life!” she said. “A poet said ‘we live too much in the world.’... I wonder did he mean just this. We grow away from or never learn the simple things. I remember my grandfather’s farm--the plowed fields, the green corn, the yellow wheat, the chickens in the garden, the mice in the barn, the smell of hay, the smell of burning leaves, the smell of the rich brown earth.... Wansfell, not for years have I remembered them. Something about you, the way you worked over that bread, like a nice old country lady, made me remember.... Oh, I wonder what I have missed!” “We all miss something. It can’t be helped. But there are compensations, and it’s never too late.” “You are a child, with all your bigness. You have the mind of a child.” “That’s one of my few blessings.... Now you try your hand at mixing the second batch of dough.” She made a picture on her knees, with her sleeves rolled up, her beautiful hands white with flour, her face beginning to flush. Adam wanted to laugh at her absolute failure to mix dough, and at the same moment he had it in him to weep over the earnestness, the sadness, the pathetic meaning of her. Eventually they prepared the meal, and she carried Virey’s breakfast in to him. Then she returned to eat with Adam. “I shall wash the dishes,” she announced. “No,” he protested. Then came a clash. It ended with a compromise. And from that clash Adam realized he might dominate her in little things, but in a great conflict of wills she would be the stronger. It was a step in his own slow education. There was a constitutional difference between men and women. Upon Adam’s resumption of the work around the shack Mrs. Virey helped him as much as he would permit, which by midday was somewhat beyond her strength. Her face sunburned rosily and her hands showed the contact with dirt and her boots were dusty. “You mustn’t overdo it,” he advised. “Rest and sleep during the noon hours.”