nd-made ranch, what's she going to do with
it? I scarcely expect her to take me into her confidence on the
matter, since she seems intent on regarding me as merely a bit of the
landscape. The disturbing part of it all is that her aloofness is so
unstudied, so indifferent in its lack of deliberation. It makes me
feel like a bump on a log. I shouldn't so much mind being actively and
martially snubbed, for that would give me something definite and
tangible to grow combative over. But you can't cross swords with a
Scotch mist.

With Dinky-Dunk her ladyship is quite different. I never see that look
of mild impatience in her opaque blue eyes when he is talking. She
flatters him openly, in fact, and a man takes to flattery, of course,
as a kitten takes to cream. Yet with all her outspokenness I am
conscious of a tremendous sense of reservation. Already, more than
once, she has given me a feeling which I'd find it very hard to
describe, a feeling as though we were being suspended over peril by
something very fragile. It's the feeling you have when you stand on
one of those frail little Alpine bridges that can sway so forebodingly
with your own weight and remind you that nothing but a rustic paling
or two separates you from the thousand-footed abysses below your
heels.

But I mustn't paint the new mistress of Casa Grande all in dark
colors. She has her good points, and a mind of her own, and a thought
or two of her own. Dinky-Dunk was asking her about Egypt. That
country, she retorted, was too dead for her. She couldn't wipe out of
her heart the memory of what man had suffered along the banks of the
Nile, during the last four thousand years, what millions of men had
suffered there because of religion and war and caste.

"I could never be happy in a country of dead races and dead creeds and
dead cities," protested Lady Alicia, with more emotion than I had
expected. "And those are the things that always stare me in the face
out there."

This brought the talk around to the New World.

"I rather fancy that a climate like yours up here," she coolly
observed, "would make luxuries of furniture and dress, and convert
what should be the accidents of life into essentials. You will always
have to fight against nature, you know, and that makes man attach more
importance to the quest of comfort. But when he lives in the tropics,
in a surrounding that leaves him with few desires, he has time to sit
down and think about his soul. That's