Dane’s proposal did not disturb her in the least. He had many times gone off for a day or two after copy, and had never suggested that she go with him, nor had she asked to do so, knowing that she could not sleep in men’s camps or lonely huts. She was glad now to hear that he was to be out in his launch, for he had been depressed the last two days, and she felt the trip would do him good. She saw him off later with a supply of food without a question in her eyes.
She spent the rest of the day with no sense of loneliness. She was becoming used, in a measure, to his absences. This was partly because they were not, as yet, so frequent as to be continually depressing. The interludes meant so much.
And then she was becoming absorbed in her first novel. It was crudely written as far as she had gone, she knew, and would take a lot of polishing, but the thing that interested her was the power to create people in her own imagination. It was a wonderful diversion. She had starved considerably for companionship till she had met Dane, and now she discovered she could make people to please herself, she could make them talk as she wanted people to talk, make them live as she wanted people to live, and she found they became extraordinarily real. And it was becoming more and more interesting to explore her own mind, to see what would come out of it in a morning, to see what her people would say and do, for they had surprising ways of their own; they would defy her intentions sometimes, and scamper off on her pages and do things of their own accord. The whole thing enormously diverted her, and she felt now that if she kept on she would some day succeed with this thing.
And so it was that she worked and played away the day after Dane left without thinking much about him. In the
