but I think, that what you mean wouldn't bother me either. Anyhow it
shouldn't spoil the fun of our trip. But no one else in the world would
believe that simple truth. If you could stay there, in those splendid
woods or a world like them, why, it would be heaven. But you have to
come back, you have to live on, perhaps for a great while, in the world
of Shadrach and Myrtle Forge. I'm not sure that I'd refuse if you asked
me to go, Howat. I just don't know if a woman can stand alone, for
that's what it would come to afterward, against a whole lifeful of
misjudgment. It might be better in the end, for everybody, if she
continued home, made the best of things with the others."

"You may possibly be right," he told her with a sudden resumption of
indifference. After all, it was unimportant whether or not Fanny Gilkan
went with him to the source of the stream he had discovered. Every one,
it became more and more evident, was alike, monotonous. He wondered
again, lounging back against the wall, about the French forts, outposts
in a vast wilderness. There was an increasing friction between the
Province and France, the legacy of King George's War, but Howat Penny's
allegiance to place was as conspicuous by its absence as the other
communal traits. Beside that, beyond Kaskaskia, at St. Navier and the
North, there was little thought of French or English; the sheer problem
of existence there drowned other considerations. He would, he thought,
go out in the spring ... leave Myrtle Forge with its droning anvil, the
endless, unvaried turning of water wheel, and the facile, trivial
chatter in and about the house. David Forsythe, back from England in the
capacity of master of fluxing metals, might acquire his, Howat's,
interest in the Penny iron.

Fanny Gilkan said, "You'll burn a hole in your coat with that pipe." He
roused himself, and she moved across the room and pinched the smoking