absurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elements
suddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves after
the strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: she
burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked
around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began
laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical
turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less
potent in the concrete.

"Quite like the Middle Ages, isn't it?" he said.

"But Walter Scott ceased writing in the thirties!" she returned, quick to
fall in with his cue.

"The swooning age outlasted him--lasted, indeed, into the era of
hoop-skirts; but that, too, is gone."

"They do give medals," she added.

"For rescuing the drowning only; and they are a great nuisance to carry
around in one's baggage. Please don't recommend me!"

Both laughed again softly, looking fairly at each other in
understanding, twentieth-century fashion. She was not to play the
classic damsel or he the classic rescuer. Yet the fact of a young man
finding a young woman brutally annoyed on the roof of the world, five
or six miles from a settlement--well, it was a fact. Over the bump of
their self-introduction, free of the serious impression of her
experience, she could think for him as well as for herself. This struck
her with sudden alarm.