last two years," she answered tonelessly, "not
since you've been here, I guess. I hate the mountains."

"I have been here nearly two years," he vouchsafed, "and I feel as if I
would never go away. But you live in the desert, don't you?"

"Sometimes, that is, when I'm not out on the road. The desert is the
place. You can breathe there, you can live there," there was a
passionate vibration in her voice, "but these old, cold mountains make
you feel all the time as if they were going to fall on you and crush
you."

"Do they make you feel that way?" He pulled his chair nearer to her so
that his back was turned to the two men, and Jose, who saw everything,
smiled faintly, mordaciously. "How strange!" It was not a conventional
expression, he seemed really to find it strange, unbelievably so.

"And you, how do they make you feel?" she asked wearily, a touch of
scorn in her glance.

A light seemed to glow over his face. "Ah, I do not know that I can tell
you," he said, and she was conscious of some immediate change in him,
which she apprehended but could never have defined. It was as if he had
withdrawn mentally to incalculable distances.

Pearl did not notice his evasion; she was not interested in his view of
the mountains. What she instinctively resented, even in her dulled
state, was his impersonal attitude toward herself. She was not used to
it from any man. She did not understand it. She wondered, without any
particular interest in the matter, but still following her instinctive
and customary mode of thought, if he had not noticed that she was
beautiful. Was he so stupid that he did not think her so? But there was
no hint in his manner or look in his eyes of an intention on his part of
playing the inevitable game, even a remembrance of it seemed as lacking
as desire. The game of challenge and elusion on her part, of perpetual
and ever more ardent advance on his. He was interested, she knew that,
but, as she felt with a surge of surprise, not in the way she had always
encountered and had learned to expect.

"Isn't it strange," she realized that he was speaking again, "that I
haven't been drawn to the desert, because so many have had to turn to
it? I have only seen it from traveling across it, and then it repelled
me, perhaps it frightened me." He seemed to consider this.

For the moment Pearl forgot the inevitable game. "Frightened you!" she
cried. "It is the mountains that frighten me; but the desert is always
diff