's two kinds of people; those that give orders,
and those that naturally take them; and I belong to the first one,
and----"

"But my dear Milt, so do I, and really----"

"And mostly I'd take them from you. But hang it, Seattle is just a day
away, and you'll forget me. Wish I could kidnap you. Have half a mind
to. Take you way up into the mountains, and when you got used to
roughing it in sure-enough wilderness--say you'd helped me haul timber
for a flume--then we'd be real pals. You have the stuff in you, but you
still need toughening before----"

"Listen to me, Milton. You have been reading fiction, about this
man--sometimes he's a lumberjack, and sometimes a trapper or a miner,
but always he's frightfully hairy--and he sees a charming woman in the
city, and kidnaps her, and shuts her up in some unspeakable shanty, and
makes her eat nice cold boiled potatoes, and so naturally, she simply
adores him! A hundred men have written that story, and it's an example
of their insane masculine conceit, which I, as a woman, resent.
Shakespeare may have started it, with his silly _Taming of the Shrew_.
Shakespeare's men may have been real, but his women were dolls, designed
to please some majesty. You may not know it, but there are women today
who don't live just to please majesties' fancies. If a woman like me
were kidnapped, she would go on hating the brute, or if she did give in,
then the man would lose anyway, because she would have degenerated;
she'd have turned into a slave, and lost exactly the things he'd liked
in her. Oh, you cavemen! With your belief that you can force women to
like you! I have more courage than any of you!"

"I admit you have courage, but you'd have still more, if you bucked the
wilds."

"Nonsense! In New York I face every day a hundred complicated problems
you don't know I ever heard of!"

"Let me remind you that Brer Julius Caesar said he'd rather be mayor in a
little Spanish town than police commissioner in Rome. I'm king in
Schoenstrom, while you're just one of a couple hundred thousand bright
people in New York----"

"Really? Oh, at least a million. Thanks!"

"Oh--gee--Claire, I didn't mean to be personal, and get in a row and
all, but--can't you see--kind of desperate--Seattle so soon----"

Her face was turned from him; its thin profile was firm as silver wire.
He blundered off into silence and--they were at it again!

"I didn't mean to make you angry," he gulped.

"Well, you did! Bul