THE RUNAWAY ROAD
You mean most of all that there's no limit to your vision. You're inordinately keen after life. That's all. You'll get over it!"
"I won't get over it!" There was fire in the Girl's eyes and she drew her breath sharply. "I say I won't get over it! There's nothing on earth that could stale me! If I live to be a hundred I sha n't wither!—why, how could I?"
Buoyant, blooming, aquiver with startled emo tions, she threw out her hands with a passionate gesture of protest.
The Man shook his shoulders and jumped up. "Perhaps you're right," he muttered. "Perhaps you are the kind that won't ever grow old. If you are—Heaven help you! Youth's nothing but a wound, anyway. Do you want to be a wound that never heals?" He laughed stridently.
Then the Girl began to fumble through sudden tears at the buckles of her saddle. Her growing hunger and faintness and the heat of the day were telling on her.
"You must think me a crazy fool," she confessed, "the way I have plunged into personalities. Why, I could go a whole year with an alien running-mate and never breathe a word or a sigh about myself, but with some people—the second you see them you know they are part of your chord. Chord is the only term in music that I understand, and I un-
141