d having lunch at an altitude of thirteen thousand five
hundred. As he toiled painfully along hundreds of feet behind them,
Florian used to take a hideous pleasure in fancying how, on reaching the
ever-distant top, the Harvard hellions would be missing. And after
searching and hallooing he would peer over the edge (13,500 feet, at the
very least, surely) and there, at the bottom, would discern their
mangled forms, distorted, crushed, and quite, quite dead.

"Yoo-o-o--hoo-oo-oo-oo!" Jessie, up the trail. His rosy dream would
vanish.

He learned why seasoned mountain climbers make nothing of the ascent. He
learned, in bitterness and unshed tears, that it is the descent that
breaks the heart and shatters the already broken frame. That down-climb
with your toes crashing through your boots at every step; with your
knee-brakes refusing to work, your thighs creaking, your joints
spavined. The views were wonderful. But, oh, the price he paid! The air
was intoxicating. But what, he asked himself, was wine to a dead man!
Miserable little cockney that he was he told himself a hundred times a
day that if he ever survived this he'd never look at another view again,
unless from the Woolworth Tower, on a calm day. He thought of New York
as a traveller, dying of thirst in the desert, thinks of the lush green
oasis. New York in July! Dear New York in July, its furs in storage, its
collar unstarched, its coat unbuttoned; even its doormen and chauffeurs
almost human. Would he ever see it again? And then, as if in answer to
his question, there befell an incident so harrowing, so
nerve-shattering, as almost to make a negative answer seem inevitable.

Florian got lost.

It was the third week of the trip. Florian had answered Jessie's eleven
thousandth question about things of which he was quite, quite ignorant.
His brain felt queer and tight, as though something were about to snap.

They were to climb the Peak next day. All that day they had been
approaching it. Florian looked at it. And he hated it. It was like a
colossal forbidding finger pointing upward, upward, taunting him,
menacing him. He wished that some huge cataclysm of nature would occur,
swallowing up this hideous mass of pitiless rock.

Jessie Heath's none too classic nose had peeled long ere this and her
neck was like a choice cut of underdone beefsteak. Florian told himself
that there was something almost indecent about a girl who cared so
little about her skin, and hair