"You might look several times at me," said Dan Andersen one day,
without preface or provocation, "and yet not read all my past in these
fair lineaments."

This seemed unworthy of notice. A man's past was a subject tabooed in
Heart's Desire. Besides, the morning was already so warm that we were
glad to seek the shade of an adobe wall. Conversation languished. Dan
Anderson absent-mindedly rolled a _cigarrillo_ with one hand, his gaze
the while fixed on the horizon, on which we could see the faint loom of
the Bonitos, toothed upon the blue sky, fifty miles away. His mind
might also have been fifty miles away, as he gazed vaguely. There was
nothing to do. There was only the sun, and as against it the shade.
That made up life at Heart's Desire. It was a million miles away to
any other sort of world; and that world, in so far as it had reference
to a past, was a subject not mentioned among the men of Heart's Desire.
Yet this morning there seemed to be something upon Dan Andersen's mind,
as he edged a little farther along into the shade, and felt in his
pocket for a match.

"No, you wouldn't think; just to look at me, my friend," said he, "you
wouldn't think, without runnin' side lines, and takin' elevations for
dips, spurs, and angles, that I had ever been anything but a barrister;
now, would you? Attorney and Counsellor-at-law, all hours of the day
and night: that bill of specifications is engraved on my brow, ain't
it? You like enough couldn't believe that I was ever anything
else--several things else, could you?"

His speech still failed of interest, except as it afforded additional
proof of the manner in which Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and the like