ripe chestnut, odd contrast to her hair; Helen May with the little red
spots gone from her cheek bones, and with tanned skin and freckles on her
nose and a laugh on her lips, coming up at a gallop with the sun behind
her, and something more; with sickness behind her and the drudgery of
eight hours in an office, and poverty and unhappiness. And Vic--yes, Vic
in overalls and a straw hat, growing up to be the strong man he never
would be in the city.

Like many another commonplace man of the towns, for all his colorless
ways and his thinning hair and his struggle against poverty, Peter was
something of a dreamer. And like all the rest of us who build our dreams
out of wishes and hopes and maybes, Peter had not a single fact to use in
his foundation. Arizona, New Mexico or Colorado--to Peter they were but
symbols of all those dear unattainable things he longed for. And that he
longed for them, not for himself but for another who was very dear to
him, only made the longing keener and more tragic.




CHAPTER TWO

IN WHICH PETER DISCOVERS A WAY OUT


We are always exclaiming over the strange way in which events link
themselves together in chains; and when the chains bind us to a certain
condition or environment, we are in the habit of blandly declaring
ourselves victims of the force of circumstances. By that rule, Peter
found himself being swept into a certain channel of thought about which