ove passages she had had, must have had, with those college
whippersnappers with whom, according to Morrison, she herded and
danced. His mind was very full of her, those six days between the
Sundays, and one thing he came to know thoroughly well; he wanted her.
And so much did he want her that his old timidity of the apron-string
was put to rout. He, who had run away from women most of his life, had
now grown so courageous as to pursue. Some Sunday, sooner or later, he
would meet her outside the office, somewhere in the hills, and then, if
they did not get acquainted, it would be because she did not care to
get acquainted.

Thus he found another card in the hand the mad god had dealt him.

How important that card was to become he did not dream, yet he decided
that it was a pretty good card. In turn, he doubted. Maybe it was a
trick of Luck to bring calamity and disaster upon him. Suppose Dede
wouldn't have him, and suppose he went on loving her more and more,
harder and harder? All his old generalized terrors of love revived.
He remembered the disastrous love affairs of men and women he had known
in the past. There was Bertha Doolittle, old Doolittle's daughter, who
had been madly in love with Dartworthy, the rich Bonanza fraction
owner; and Dartworthy, in turn, not loving Bertha at all, but madly
loving Colonel Walthstone's wife and eloping down the Yukon with her;
and Colonel Walthstone himself, madly loving his own wife and lighting
out in pursuit of the fleeing couple. And what had been the outcome?
Certainly Bertha's love had been unfortunate and tragic, and so had the
love of the other three. Down below Minook, Colonel Walthstone and
Dartworthy had fought it out. Dartworthy had been killed. A bullet
through the Colonel's lungs had so weakened him that he died of
pneumonia the following spring. And the Colonel's wife had no one left
alive on earth to love.

And then there was Freda, drowning herself in the running mush-ice
because of some man on the other side of the world, and hating him,
Daylight, because he had happened along and pulled her out of the
mush-ice and back to life. And the Virgin.... The old memories
frightened him. If this love-germ gripped him good and hard, and if
Dede wouldn't have him, it might be almost as bad as being gouged out
of all he had by Dowsett, Letton, and Guggenhammer. Had his nascent
desire for Dede been less, he might well have been frightened out of
all thought