travel and gold-mining, he,
in turn, touch by touch, painted an ever clearer portrait of her. She amp-
lified the ranch life of her girlhood, prattling on about horses and dogs
and persons and things until it was as if he saw the whole process of her
growth and her becoming. All this he was able to trace on through the
period of her father's failure and death, when she had been compelled to
leave the university and go into office work. The brother, too, she spoke
of, and of her long struggle to have him cured and of her now fading
hopes. Daylight decided that it was easier to come to an understanding
of her than he had anticipated, though he was always aware that behind
and under all he knew of her was the mysterious and baffling woman
and sex. There, he was humble enough to confess to himself, was a chart-
less, shoreless sea, about which he knew nothing and which he must
nevertheless somehow navigate.
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His lifelong fear of woman had originated out of non-understanding
and had also prevented him from reaching any understanding. Dede on
horseback, Dede gathering poppies on a summer hillside, Dede taking
down dictation in her swift shorthand strokes—all this was comprehens-
ible to him. But he did not know the Dede who so quickly changed from
mood to mood, the Dede who refused steadfastly to ride with him and
then suddenly consented, the Dede in whose eyes the golden glow
forever waxed and waned and whispered hints and messages that were
not for his ears. In all such things he saw the glimmering profundities of
sex, acknowledged their lure, and accepted them as incomprehensible.
There was another side of her, too, of which he was consciously ignor-
ant. She knew the books, was possessed of that mysterious and awful
thing called "culture." And yet, what continually surprised him was that
this culture was never obtruded on their intercourse. She did not talk
books, nor art, nor similar folderols. Homely minded as he was himself,
he found her almost equally homely minded. She liked the simple and
the out-of-doors, the horses and the hills, the sunlight and the flowers.
He found himself in a partly new flora, to which she was the guide,
pointing out to him all the varieties of the oaks, making him acquainted
with the madrono and the manzanita, teaching him the names, habits,
and habitats of unending series of wild flowers, shrubs, and ferns. Her
keen woods eye was another delight to him. It had been trained in the
open, and little escaped it. One day, as a test, they strove to see which
could discover the greater number of birds' nests. And he, who had al-
ways prided himself on his own acutely trained observation, found him-
self hard put to keep his score ahead. At the end of the day he was but
three nests in the lead, one of which she challenged stoutly and of which
even he confessed serious doubt. He complimented her and told her that
her success must be due to the fact that she was a bird herself, with all a
bird's keen vision and quick-flashing ways.
The more he knew her the more he became convinced of this birdlike
quality in her. That was why she liked to ride, he argued. It was the
nearest approach to flying. A field of poppies, a glen of ferns, a row of
poplars on a country lane, the tawny brown of a hillside, the shaft of
sunlight on a distant peak—all such were provocative of quick joys
which seemed to him like so many outbursts of song. Her joys were in
little things, and she seemed always singing. Even in sterner things it
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