"And you never said one word about it, when I told you all my plans, about being a civil engineer, and everything?"
"O Chet, I didn't really have any plans. I didn't even hope the least bit,—it looked too big for me to ever even think about except in the dark, and I don't hardly dare to talk about it now. Father says my work is very crude yet, but that it has something in it that is 'different'; and so he says that he has hopes that if I keep everlastingly at it, I may some time be able to do something worth while."
"But why can't you do it here, just as well?"
"Oh, he says it's so easy to drop off anything like that, when one is always in the same surroundings; and he wants me to 'get the habit'; and the main thing, at first, is to have something that you just have to write about, to get it out of your system; and he thinks that if I'm travelling and having experiences, and among strangers, so that I won't have any one to talk it out to, that I'll put it on the type-writer to him in letters. But he said"—Bess laughed and rocked back and forth, "he said that if he caught me trying to 'write fine,' instead of in the natural way, as I've been
