a child:

"I am ver-ee cold!"

He rubbed her hand protectingly, her mouselike hand in its fur-lined
glove. His canny, self-defensive, Scotchlike Norse soul opened its
gates. He knew a longing to give, a passion to protect her, a whelming
desire to have shy secrets with this slim girl. All the poetry in the
world sounded its silver harps within him because his eyes were opened
and it was given to him to see her face. Gently he said:

"Yes, it's cold, and there's big gray ghosts hiding there in the
trees, with their leathery wings, that were made out of sea-fog by the
witches, folded in front of them, and they're glumming at us over the
bony, knobly joints on top their wings, with big, round platter eyes.
And the wind is calling us--it's trying to snatch us out on the arctic
snow-fields, to freeze us. But I'll fight them all off. I won't let
them take you, Ruth."

"I'm sure you won't, Carl."

"And--oh--you won't let Phil Dunleavy keep you from running away, not
for a while yet?"

"M-maybe not."

The sky had cleared. She tilted up her chin and adored the
stars--stars like the hard, cold, fighting sparks that fly from a
trolley-wire. Carl looked down fondly, noting how fair-skinned was her
forehead in contrast to her thick, dark brows, as the arc-light's
brilliance rested on her worshiping face--her lips a-tremble and
slightly parted. She raised her arms, her fingers wide-spread,
praising the star-gods. She cried only, "Oh, all this----" but it was
a prayer to a greater god Pan, shaking his snow-incrusted beard to the
roar of northern music. To Carl her cry seemed to pledge faith in the
starred sky and the long trail and a glorious restlessness that by a
dead fireplace of white, smooth marble would never find content.

"Like sword-points, those stars are," he said, then----

Then they heard the trolley-car's flat wheels grinding on a curve. Its
search-light changed the shadow-haunted woodland to a sad group of
scanty trees, huddling in front of an old bill-board, with its top
broken and the tattered posters flapping. The wanderers stepped from
the mystical romance of the open night into the exceeding realism of
the car--highly realistic wooden floor with small, muddy pools from
lumps of dirty melting snow, hot air, a smell of Italian workmen, a
German conductor with the sniffles, a row of shoes mostly wet and all
wrinkled. They had to stand. Most realistic of all, they read the
glossy car-signs advertising soap