Carlotta made a little inarticulate exclamation.  Mechanically she counted the cars of the train which was winding its black, snake-like trail far down below them in the valley.  It hadn’t occurred to her that the moon would be difficult to dislodge.  Perhaps Carlotta didn’t know much about moons, after all.

Phil went on talking earnestly, putting his case before her as best he might.  He owed it to Carlotta to try to make her understand if he could.  He thought that, under all the whimsicalities, it was rather fine of her to lay down her princess pride and let him see she cared, that she really wanted him.  It made her dearer, harder to resist than ever.  If only he could make her understand!

“You see I’m not fitted for city life,” he explained.  “I hate it.  I like to live where everybody has a plot of green grass in front of his house to set his rocking chair in Sunday afternoons; where people can have trees that they know as well as they know their own family and don’t have to go to a park to look at ’em; where they can grow tulips and green peas—­and babies, too, if the lord is good to ’em.  I want to plant my roots where people are neighborly and interested in each other as human beings, not shut away like cave dwellers in apartment houses, not knowing or caring who is on the other side of the wall.  I should get to hating people if I had to be crowded into a subway with them, day after day, treading on their toes, and they on mine.  Altogether I am afraid I have a small town mind, sweetheart.”

He smiled at Carlotta as he made the confession, but she did not respond.  Her face gave not the slightest indication as to what was going on in her mind as he talked.

“I wouldn’t be any good at all in your father’s establishment.  I’ve never wanted to make money on the grand scale.  I wouldn’t be my father’s son if I did.  I couldn’t be a banker or a broker if I tried, and I don’t want to try.”

“Not even for the sake of—­having me?” Carlotta’s voice was as expressionless as her face.  She still watched the train, almost vanishing from sight now in the far distance, leaving a cloud of ugly black smoke behind it to mar the lustrous azure of the June sky.

Phil, too, looked out over the valley.  He dared not look at Carlotta.  He was young and very much in love.  He wanted Carlotta exceedingly.  For a minute everything blurred before his gaze.  It seemed as if he would try anything, risk anything, give up anything, ride rough shod over anything, even his own ideals, to gain her.  It was a tense moment.  He came very near surrendering and thereby making himself, and Carlotta too, unhappy forever after.  But something stronger held him back.  Oddly enough he seemed to see that sign Stuart Lambert and Son written large all over the valley.  His gaze came back to Carlotta.  Their eyes met.  The hardness was gone from the girl’s, leaving a wistful tenderness, a sweet surrender, no man had ever seen there before.  A weaker lad would have capitulated under that wonderful, new look of Carlotta’s.  It only strengthened Philip Lambert.  It was for her as well as himself.