, even in midsummer, never entirely disappears at altitude ten
thousand feet, they could look away westward over a billowing sea of
mountain and mesa and valley breaking in far-distant, crystalline space
against the mighty rampart of the Wasatch range, two hundred and other
miles nearer the sunset.

It was an outlook both inspiring and chastening; with the scenic
grandeurs to give the exalted uplift, and the still, gray-green face of
the vast mountainous desert to shrink the beholder to microscopic
littleness in the face of its stupendous heights and depths, its
immeasurable bulks and interspaces. Miss Alicia said something like this
to Ford, in broken exclamations, when she had taken her first quailing
eye-plunge from the lofty view-point.

"Yes; quite so," Ford acquiesced, in the unresponsive tone of one who
says what he must, rather than what he would like to say. "It is all the
things you have been saying, and more--when one has the time and the
mind to be enthusiastic about it."

Miss Adair stood up very straight, and her chin was a protest in
Praxitelean harmonies. She knew very well how reluctantly her companion
was doing the honors of the mountain vastnesses; how full of wrath he
was because President Colbrith had seen fit to precipitate the Nadia and
a private-car party into the midst of the strenuous building battle on
the western extension. But she argued that this was no reason why he
should be crustily impossible with her. Wherefore she said, merely to
see him boil over:

"I should think you would come up here often for this glorious view, Mr.
Ford. You do, don't you?"

"Come up here for the view? Oh, yes; I presume I have climbed up here a
hundred times, first and last, and always for the sake of the view. I
began it the first winter I spent in Saint's Rest, when the snow-shoeing
was at its best. Really to appreciate the scenery, you should take three
hours for the approach from the basin down yonder, dragging a pair of
Canadian raquettes by the toe-straps."

The young woman laughed inwardly at the broadsword slash of his sarcasm.
It was so like the man; big and vigorous and energetic, and quite
without regard for consequences or for the insignificance of the thing
to be obliterated. But she would not spare him.

"How enthusiastic you are!" she commented. "I don't believe I should be
equal to 'a hundred times, first and last,' or to the snow-shoes. But I
can admire such zeal in other people immense