nated, though he was unable to analyze it; while the
simplicity delighted him--expensive simplicity, he decided, and most of
it leftovers from the time her father went broke and died. He had
never before appreciated a plain hardwood floor with a couple of
wolfskins; it sure beat all the carpets in creation. He stared
solemnly at a bookcase containing a couple of hundred books. There was
mystery. He could not understand what people found so much to write
about.

Writing things and reading things were not the same as doing things,
and himself primarily a man of action, doing things was alone
comprehensible.

His gaze passed on from the Crouched Venus to a little tea-table with
all its fragile and exquisite accessories, and to a shining copper
kettle and copper chafing-dish. Chafing dishes were not unknown to
him, and he wondered if she concocted suppers on this one for some of
those University young men he had heard whispers about. One or two
water-colors on the wall made him conjecture that she had painted them
herself. There were photographs of horses and of old masters, and the
trailing purple of a Burial of Christ held him for a time. But ever
his gaze returned to that Crouched Venus on the piano. To his homely,
frontier-trained mind, it seemed curious that a nice young woman should
have such a bold, if not sinful, object on display in her own room.
But he reconciled himself to it by an act of faith. Since it was Dede,
it must be eminently all right. Evidently such things went along with
culture. Larry Hegan had similar casts and photographs in his
book-cluttered quarters. But then, Larry Hegan was different. There
was that hint of unhealth about him that Daylight invariably sensed in
his presence, while Dede, on the contrary, seemed always so robustly
wholesome, radiating an atmosphere compounded of the sun and wind and
dust of the open road. And yet, if such a clean, healthy woman as she
went in for naked women crouching on her piano, it must be all right.
Dede made it all right. She could come pretty close to making anything
all right. Besides, he didn't understand culture anyway.

She reentered the room, and as she crossed it to her chair, he admired
the way she walked, while the bronze slippers were maddening.

"I'd like to ask you several questions," he began immediately "Are you
thinking of marrying somebody?"

She laughed merrily and shook her head.

"Do you like anybody else more than