g attack of the blues in consideration of them as men.
Nevertheless, she found herself unable to view them as she had viewed,
say, the clerks in her father's office.

She began to brush her hair and to wonder what sort of food would be
served for supper.

CHAPTER IV

A FORETASTE OF THINGS TO COME

Half an hour later she sat down with her brother at one end of a table
that was but a long bench covered with oilcloth. Chairs there were none.
A narrow movable bench on each side of the fixed table furnished seating
capacity for twenty men, provided none objected to an occasional nudging
from his neighbor's elbow. The dishes, different from any she had ever
eaten from, were of enormously thick porcelain, dead white, variously
chipped and cracked with fine seams. But the food, if plain, was of
excellent quality, tastily cooked. She discovered herself with an
appetite wholly independent of silver and cut glass and linen. The tin
spoons and steel knives and forks harrowed her aesthetic sense without
impairing her ability to satisfy hunger.

They had the dining room to themselves. Through a single shiplap
partition rose a rumble of masculine talk, where the logging crew loafed
in their bunkhouse. The cook served them without any ceremony, putting
everything on the table at once,--soup, meat, vegetables, a bread
pudding for dessert, coffee in a tall tin pot. Benton introduced him to
his sister. He withdrew hastily to the kitchen, and they saw no more of
him.

"Charlie," the girl said plaintively, when the man had closed the door
behind him, "I don't quite fathom your social customs out here. Is one
supposed to know everybody that one encounters?"

"Just about," he grinned. "Loggers, Siwashes, and the natives in
general. Can't very well help it, Sis. There's so few people in this
neck of the woods that nobody can afford to be exclusive,--at least,
nobody who lives here any length of time. You can't tell when you may
have to call on your neighbor or the fellow working for you in a matter
of life and death almost. A man couldn't possibly maintain the same
attitude toward a bunch of loggers working under him that would be
considered proper back where we came from. Take me, for instance, and my
case is no different from any man operating on a moderate scale out
here. I'd get the reputation of being swell-headed, and they'd put me in
the hole at every turn. They wouldn't care what they did or how it was
done. Ten to one