contingency, nor even considered it.

"We never dreamed of your refusing to come with us," said Will.

"We still don't dream of it!" Fred asserted, and she turned her head
very swiftly to look at him with level brows. Next she met my eyes.
If there was in her consciousness the slightest trace of doubt, or
fear, or admission that her sex might be less responsible than ours,
she did not show it. Rather in the blue eyes and the athletic poise
of chin, and neck, and shoulders there was a dignity beyond ours.

Will laughed.

"Don't let's be ridiculous," she said. "I shall do as I see fit."

Fred's neat beard has a trick of losing something of its trim when
he proposes to assert himself, and I recognized the symptoms. But
at the moment of that impasse the Armenians below us had decided
that self-assertion was their cue, and there came great noises as
they thundered with a short pole on the trap and made the stones
jump that held it down.

At that signal several women emerged from behind the hanging blankets
--young and old women in various states of disarray--and stood in
attitudes suggestive of aggression. One did not get the idea that
Armenians, men or women, were sheeplike pacifists. They watched
Miss Vanderman with the evident purpose of attacking us the moment
she appealed to them.

"If you don't roll the stones away I think there'll be trouble,"