efuse outright, yet could not
utter the words. "I'm not very presentable."

"Get in. Don't be silly," she said impatiently. "You don't think I've
become a snob just because chance has pitchforked me into the ranks of
the idle rich, do you?"

Thompson laughed awkwardly. There was real feeling in her tone, as if
she had read correctly his hesitation and resented it. After all, why
not? It would merely be an incident to Sophie Carr, and it would save
him some hot and dusty miles. He got in.

"I'm quite curious to know where you've been and what you've been doing
for the last year," she said, when the red car was once more rolling
toward the city at a sedate pace. "And by the way, where did you learn
to change a tire so smartly?"

"My last job," Thompson told her truthfully, "was washing cars,
greasing up, and changing tires in a country garage down in the San
Juan." He paused for a moment. "Before that I was chaperon to a stable
full of horses on a Salinas ranch. I've tried being a carpenter's
helper, an assistant gardener, understudy to a suburban plumber--and
other things too numerous to mention--in the last three months. I think
the most satisfactory thing I've tackled was the woods up north, last
fall."

"You must have acquired experience, at least, even if none of those
things proved an efficient method of making money," she returned
lightly.

"A man like me," he remarked, "has first to learn how to make a living
before he can set about making money."

"Making money is relative. Quite often it merely means making a living
with an extended horizon," she observed. "I know a man with a
ten-thousand-dollar salary who finds it a living, no more."

"Poor devil," he drawled sardonically. "When I get into the
ten-thousand-a-year class I rather think it will afford me a few trifles
beyond bare subsistence."

She smiled.

"Have you set that for a mark to shoot at?"

"I haven't set any limit," he replied. "I haven't got my sights adjusted
yet."

"I can scarcely assure myself that you are really you," she said after a
momentary silence. "I can't seem to disassociate you with Lone Moose and
a blundering optimism, a mystical faith that the Lord would make things
come out right if you only leaned on Him hard enough. Now your talk is
flavored with both egotism and the bitterness of the cynic."

"How should a man talk?" he demanded. "Like a worm if he chance to be
trodden on a few times? Does a man necessarily become