“Was it a compliment?” Nick asked doubtfully and boyishly.  “Well, I’m real glad I was smart enough to bring one off.  I spoke out just what came into my mind, and I’d have felt mighty bad if you’d been cross.”

“I’m not cross!” she assured him.  “I’d rather be a woman—­for you—­than an angel.  Angels are cold, far-off, impossible things that men can’t grasp.  Besides, their wings would probably moult.”

Nick laughed, a pleasant, soft laugh, half under his breath.  “Say, I don’t picture angels with wings!  The sort that flits into my mind when I’m tired out after a right hard day and feel kind of lonesome for something beautiful, I don’t know hardly what—­only something I’ve never had—­that sort of angel is a woman, too, and not cold, though far above me, of course.  She has starry eyes and moonlight hair—­lots of it, hanging down in waves that could almost drown her.  But I guess, after all—­as you say—­that sort’s not my line.  I’ll never come in the light she makes with her shining, and if I should by accident, she wouldn’t go shooting any of her starry glances my way.”

Carmen was vexed again.  “I didn’t know you were so sentimental, Nick!”

He looked half ashamed.

“Well, I didn’t know I was, either, till it popped out,” he grinned.  “But I suppose ’most every man has sentimental spells.  Maybe, even, he wouldn’t be worth his salt if he hadn’t.  Sometimes I think that way.  But my spells don’t come on often.  When they do, it’s generally nights in spring—­like this, when special kinds of night-thoughts come flyin’ along like moths—­thoughts about past and future.  But lately, since that blessed little oil town has been croppin’ up like a bed of mushrooms round my big gusher—­or rather, the company’s gusher, as it is now—­I’ve had my mind on that more than anything else, unless it’s been my ditches.  Gee! there’s as much romance about irrigation in this country, I guess, as there is about angels which you can see only in dreams; for you see every day, when you’re wide awake, the miracle of your ditches.  You just watch your desert stretches or your meanest grazin’ meadows turn into fairyland.  I say, Mrs. Gaylor, have you ever read a mighty fine book—­old but good and fresh as to-morrow’s bread—­called The Arabian Nights?”

“I don’t know.  I dare say I read some of it when I was a little girl,” replied Carmen, wondering what Nick was leading up to.  “It’s for children, isn’t it?”

“I reckon it’s for every one with the right stuff in ’em,” said Nick.  “Anyhow, I haven’t grown up enough to get beyond it.  I don’t mean ever to turn the boy that lives inside of me out-of-doors.  If I ever do anything to make him so mad that he quits, I’ll be finished—­dried up.  That book, The Arabian Nights, has got a dead clinch on me.  You know, when I run into Bakersfield, I like to have a browse in the bookstores.  It sort of rests me, and seein’ the pictures in that book made me buy it—­a birthday present for my affectionate self——­”