, Saxon, how a prizefighter is run
after. Why, sometimes it's seemed to me that girls an' women ain't got
an ounce of natural shame in their make-up. Oh, I was never afraid of
them, believe muh, but I didn't hanker after 'em. A man's a fool that'd
let them kind get his goat.

"Maybe you haven't got love in you," she challenged.

"Maybe I haven't," was his discouraging reply. "Anyway, I don't
see myself lovin' a girl that runs after me. It's all right for
Charley-boys, but a man that is a man don't like bein' chased by women."

"My mother always said that love was the greatest thing in the world,"
Saxon argued. "She wrote poems about it, too. Some of them were
published in the San Jose Mercury."

"What do you think about it?"

"Oh, I don't know," she baffled, meeting his eyes with another lazy
smile. "All I know is it's pretty good to be alive a day like this."

"On a trip like this--you bet it is," he added promptly.

At one o'clock Billy turned off the road and drove into an open space
among the trees.

"Here's where we eat," he announced. "I thought it'd be better to have
a lunch by ourselves than atop at one of these roadside dinner counters.
An' now, just to make everything safe an' comfortable, I'm goin' to
unharness the horses. We got lots of time. You can get the lunch basket
out an' spread it on the lap-robe."

As Saxon unpacked she basket she was appalled at his extravagance.
She spread an amazing array of ham and chicken sandwiches, crab salad,
hard-boiled eggs, pickled pigs' feet, ripe olives and dill pickles,
Swiss cheese, salted almonds, oranges and bananas, and several pint
bottles of beer. It was the quantity as well as the variety that
bothered her. It had the appearance of a reckless attempt to buy out a
whole delicatessen shop.

"You oughtn't to blow yourself that way," she reproved him as he sat
down beside her. "Why it's enough for half a dozen bricklayers."

"It's all right, isn't it?"

"Yes," she acknowledged. "But that's the trouble. It's too much so."

"Then it's all right," he concluded. "I always believe in havin' plenty.
Have some beer to wash the dust away before we begin? Watch out for the
glasses. I gotta return them."

Later, the meal finished, he lay on his back, smoking a cigarette, and
questioned her about her earlier history. She had been telling him of
her life in her brother's house, where she paid four dollars and a half
a week board. At fifteen she had graduated fr