he. "You'll learn some day to look on that sort of thing as you
would on an attempt to shovel highways and set up sign-posts in
the open sea. Your kind of people are like the children that build
forts out of sand at the seashore. Along comes a wave and washes
it all away....You'd be willing for me to abandon my career and
become a rich nonentity in New York?"

His tone was distinctly offensive. "I don't look at it in that
way," said she coldly. "Really, I care nothing about it." And she
resumed the reading of her letter.

"Do you expect me to believe," demanded he, excited and angry--"do
you expect me to believe you've not given the subject of our
future a thought?"

She continued reading. Such a question in such a tone called for
the rebuke of an ignoring silence. Also, deep down in her nature,
down where the rock foundations of courage should have been but
were not, there had begun an ominous trembling.

"You know what my salary is?"

"You just mentioned it."

"You know it's to be only five hundred dollars a year more after
January?"

"I knew the Cabinet people got eight thousand." She was gazing
dreamily out toward the purple horizon, seemed as far as its
mountains from worldliness.