not suggest strength as this man did. And his face,--it was so
grimly determined at times that she shrank from it, then drew
near, fascinated. It had no beauty at all--according to Californian
standards; she could not know that it represented all that intellect,
refinement and civilization, generally, would do for the human
race for a century to come,--but it had a subtle power, an absolute
audacity, an almost contemptuous fearlessness in its bold, fine
outline, a dominating intelligence in the keen deeply-set eyes, and
a hint of weakness, where and what she could not determine, that
mystified and magnetized her.

"I know you a little better," she said, "just a little,--enough to
make my curiosity ache and jump. At the same time, I know now what I
did not before,--that I might climb and mine and study and watch, and
you would always be beyond me. There is something subtle and evasive
about you--something I seem to be close to always, yet never can see
or grasp."

"It is merely the barrier of sex. A man can know a woman fairly well,
because her life, consequently the interests which mould her mind and
conceive her thoughts, are more or less simple. A man's life is so
complex, his nature so inevitably the sum and work of it of it lies
so far outside of woman's sphere, his mind spiked with a thousand
magnets, each pointing to a different possibility,--that she would
need divine wisdom to comprehend him in his entirety, even if he made
her a diagram of every cell in his brain,--which he never would, out
of consideration for both her and his own vanity. But within certain
restrictions there can be a magnificent sense of comradeship."

"But a woman, I think, would never be happy with that something in