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You see, Myra and Florian really had so much in common that if he had been honest with himself the course of their love would have run too smooth to be true. But Florian, in his effort to register as a two-fisted, hard-riding, nature-taming male, made such a success of it that for a long time he deceived even Myra who loved him. And during that time she, too, lied in her frantic effort to match her step with his. When he talked of riding and swimming; of long, hard mountain hikes; of impenetrable woods, she looked at him with sparkling eyes. (She didn’t need to throw much effort into that, nature having supplied her with the ground materials.) When, on their rare Sundays together, he suggested a long tramp up the Palisades she agreed enthusiastically, though she hated it. Not only that, she went, loathing it. The stones hurt her feet. Her slender ankles ached. The sun burned her delicate skin. The wind pierced her thin coat. Florian strode along with the exaggerated step of the short man who bitterly resents his lack of stature. Every now and then he stood still, and breathed deeply, and said, “Glorious!” And Myra looked at his straight back, and his clear-cut profile, and his well-dressed legs and said, “Isn’t it!” and wished he would kiss her. But he never did.

In between times he bemoaned his miserable two weeks’ vacation which made impossible the sort of thing he said he craved–a long, hard, rough trip into a mountain interior. The Rockies, preferably, in their jaggedest portions.

“That’s the kind of thing that makes a fellow over. Roughing it. You forget about the city. In the saddle all day–nothing but sky and mountains. God’s big open spaces! That’s the life!”

Myra trudged along, painfully. “But isn’t it awfully uncomfortable? You know. Cold? And tents? I don’t think I’d like—-“

“I wouldn’t give a cent for a person who was so soft they couldn’t stand roughing it a little. That’s the trouble with you Easterners. Soft! No red blood. Too many street cars, and high buildings, and restaurants. Chop down a few trees and fry your own bacon, and make your own camp, and saddle your own horses–that’s what I call living. I’m going back to it some day, see if I don’t.”

Myra looked down at her own delicate wrists, with the blue veins so exquisitely etched against the white flesh. A little look of terror and hopelessness came into her eyes.

“I–I couldn’t chop down a tree,” she said. She was panting a little in keeping up with him, for he was walking very fast. “I’d be afraid to saddle a horse. You have to stand right next to them, don’t you? Most girls can’t chop—-“

Florian smiled a little superior smile. “Miss Jessie Heath can.” Myra looked up at him, quickly. “She’s a wonder! She was in yesterday,” he went on. “Spent all of two hours up in my department, looking things over. There’s nothing she can’t do. She won a blue ribbon at the Horse Show in February. Saddle. She’s climbed every peak that amounts to anything in Europe. Did the Alps when she was a little girl. This summer she’s going to do the Rockies, because things are so mussed up in Europe, she says. I’m selecting the outfit for the party. Gad, what a trip!” He sighed, deeply.

Myra was silent. She was not ungenerous toward women, as are so many pretty girls. But she was human, after all, and she did love this Florian, and Jessie Heath was old man Heath’s daughter. Whenever she came into the store she created a little furore among the clerks. Myra could not resist a tiny flash of claws.

“She’s flat, like a man. And she wears 7-1/2-C. And her face looks as if it had been rubbed with a scouring brick.”

“She’s a goddess!” said Florian, striding along. Myra laughed, a little high hysterical laugh. Then she bit her lip, and then she was silent for a long time. He was silent, too, until suddenly he heard a little sound that made him turn quickly to look at her stumbling along at his side. And she was crying.