house in a fairy tale.

Joan shook her head. "No," she said. "No. I'm just the last word of
this very minute. Everybody in America for a hundred and fifty years
has worked to make me. I'm the reward of mighty effort. I'm the
dream-child of the pioneers, as far removed from them as the chimney
of the highest building ftora the rock on which it's rooted."

Palgrave laughed a little. "It appears that you did some thinking
out there in your country cage."

"Thinking! That's all I had to do! I spent a lifetime standing on
the hill with the woods behind me trying to catch the music of this
street, the sound of this very car, and I thought it all out, every
bit of it."

"Every bit of what?"

"Life and death and the great hereafter," she said, "principally
life. That's why I'm going out to dinner with you instead of going
early to bed."

The glare of a lamp silvered her profile and the young curve of her
bosom. Somewhere, at some time, Palgrave had knelt humbly, with
strange anguish and hunger, at the feet of a girl with just that
young proud face and those unawakened eyes. The memory of it was
like an echo of an echo.

"Why," said Joan, halting for a moment on her way to the steps of
the old hotel, "this looks like a picture postcard of a bit of