would have felt vastly more at ease in this rude logging camp, knowing
that she could leave it if she desired.

So far as she could see things, she looked at them with measurable
clearness, without any vain illusions concerning her ability to march
triumphant over unknown fields of endeavor. Along practical lines she
had everything to learn. Culture furnishes an excellent pair of wings
wherewith to soar in skies of abstraction, but is a poor vehicle to
carry one over rough roads. She might have remained in Philadelphia, a
guest among friends. Pride forbade that. Incidentally, such an
arrangement would have enabled her to stalk a husband, a moneyed
husband, which did not occur to her at all. There remained only to join
Charlie. If his fortunes mended, well and good. Perhaps she could even
help in minor ways.

But it was all so radically different--brother and all--from what she
had pictured that she was filled with dismay and not a little foreboding
of the future. Sufficient, however, unto the day was the evil thereof,
she told herself at last, and tried to make that assurance work a change
of heart. She was very lonely and depressed and full of a futile wish
that she were a man.

Over across the bay some one was playing an accordeon, and to its
strains a stout-lunged lumberjack was roaring out a song, with all his
fellows joining strong in the chorus:

"Oh, the Saginaw Kid was a cook in a camp, way up on the Ocon-to-o-o.
And the cook in a camp in them old days had a damn hard row to hoe-i-oh!
Had a damn hard row to hoe."