d 'em up, as
a race. I guess civilization proper began when men mastered metals."

Ray was not vain about his bookish phrases. He did not use them to show
off, but because they seemed to him more adequate than colloquial
speech. He felt strongly about these things, and groped for words, as he
said, "to express himself." He had the lamentable American belief that
"expression" is obligatory. He still carried in his trunk, among the
unrelated possessions of a railroad man, a notebook on the title-page of
which was written "Impressions on First Viewing the Grand Canyon, Ray H.
Kennedy." The pages of that book were like a battlefield; the laboring
author had fallen back from metaphor after metaphor, abandoned position
after position. He would have admitted that the art of forging metals
was nothing to this treacherous business of recording impressions, in
which the material you were so full of vanished mysteriously under your
striving hand. "Escaping steam!" he had said to himself, the last time
he tried to read that notebook.

Thea didn't mind Ray's travel-lecture expressions. She dodged them,
unconsciously, as she did her father's professional palaver. The light
in Ray's pale-blue eyes and the feeling in his voice more than made up
for the stiffness of his language.

"Were the Cliff-Dwellers really clever with their hands, Ray, or do you
always have to make allowance and say, 'That was pretty good for an
Indian'?" she asked.

Ray went down into the car to give some instructions to Giddy. "Well,"
he said when he returned, "about the aborigines: once or twice I've been
with some fellows who were cracking burial mounds. Always felt a little
ashamed of it, but we did pull out some remarkable things. We got some
pottery out whole; seemed pretty fine to me. I guess their women were
their artists. We found lots of old shoes and sandals made out of yucca
fiber, neat and strong; and feather blankets, too."

"Feather blankets? You never told me about them."

"Didn't I? The old fellows--or the squaws--wove a close netting of yucca
fiber, and then tied on little bunches of down feathers, overlapping,
just the way feathers grow on a bird. Some of them were feathered on
both sides. You can't get anything warmer than that, now, can you?--or
prettier. What I like about those old aborigines is, that they got all
their ideas from nature."

Thea laughed. "That means you're going to say something about girls'
wearing corsets. But some