ons in bridges."

The girl's eyes sought the sky-line of the bench that rose on both
sides of the mile-wide valley through which the track of the great
transcontinental railroad wound like a yellow serpent.

"It's level up there. Why couldn't they have built it along the edge?"

The man smiled: "And bridged all those ravines!" he pointed to gaps and
notches in the level sky-line where the mouths of creek beds and
coulees flashed glimpses of far mountains. "Each one of those ravines
would have meant a trestle and trestles run into big money."

"And so they built the railroad down here in this ditch where people
have to sit and swelter and look at their old shiny rails and scraggly
green bushes and dirt walls, while up there only a half a mile away the
great rolling plains stretch away to the mountains that seem so near
you could walk to them in an hour."

"But, my dear girl, it would not be practical. Railroads are built
primarily with an eye to dividends and--" The girl interrupted him
with a gesture of impatience.

"I hate things that are practical--hate even the word. There is
nothing in all the world so deadly as practicability. It is ruthless
and ugly. It disregards art and beauty and all the higher things that
make life worth living. It is a monster whose god is dollars--and who
serves that god well. What does any tourist know of the real West--the
West that lies beyond those level rims of dirt? How much do you or I
know of it? The West to us is a thin row of scrub bushes along a
narrow, shallow river, with a few little white-painted towns sprinkled
along, that for all we can see might be in Illinois or Ohio. I've been
away a whole winter and for all the West I've seen I might as well have
stayed in Brooklyn."

"But certainly you enjoyed California!"

"California! Yes, as California. But California isn't the _West_!
California is New York with a few orange groves thrown in. It is a
tourist's paradise. A combination of New York and Palm Beach. The
real West lies east of the Rockies, the uncommercialized,
unexploited--I suppose you would add, the unpractical West. A New
Yorker gets as good an idea of the West when he travels by train to
California as a Californian would get of New York were he to arrive by
way of the tube and spend the winter in the Fritz-Waldmore."

"I rather liked California, what little I saw of it. A business trip
does not afford an ideal opportunity for sight seeing.