“Well—­really!  Messages!  Why this haughty aloofness?  Doesn’t he mean to come over?”

“Oh yes, of course; to-morrow—­perhaps to-night.  He’s fearfully busy—­stopped off on his way East.  There’s a row on in the forest service about some of Osborne’s timber claims—­mining claims, too, I believe—­in Colorado.  Those years in the West have developed Fred splendidly.  He’s gone from boy to man, and a fine specimen of man, at that.”

“He likes his work?”

“Full of it.”  Wayne was silent for a moment, then added:  “I envied him.”

It startled Katie.  “Envied him?  Why—­why, Wayne?  Surely you’re lucky.”

He laughed:  not the laugh of a man too pleased with his luck.  “Oh, am I?  Perhaps I am, but just the same I envy a fellow who can look that way when talking about his work.”

“But you have a work, Wayne.”

“No, I have a place.”

She grew more and more puzzled.  “Why, Wayne, you’ve been all wrapped up in this thing you were doing.”

He threw his cigarette away impatiently.  “Oh yes, just for the sake of doing it.  I get a certain satisfaction in scheming things out.  I must say, however, I’d like to scheme out something I’d get some satisfaction in having schemed out.  A morsel of truth dropped from the mouth of a babe a minute ago.  You may have observed, Katie, that his inquiry was more direct and reasonable than your reply.  An improvement on a rifle.  Not such a satisfying thing to leave to a rifle eliminating future.”

“But I didn’t know the army admitted it was to be a rifle eliminating future.”

“I’m not saying that the army does,” he laughed.

He passed again to that look of almost passionate concentration which Katie had always supposed meant metallic fouling or some—­to her—­equally incomprehensible thing.  He emerged from it to exclaim tensely:  “Oh I get so sick of the spirit of the army!”

Instinctively Katie looked around.  He saw it, and laughed.

“There you go!  We’ve made a perfect fetich of loyalty.  It’s a different sort of loyalty those forestry fellows have—­a more live, more constructive loyalty.  The loyalty that comes, not through form, but through devotion to the work—­a common interest in a common cause.  Ours is built on dead things.  Custom, and the caste—­I know no other word—­just the bull-headed, asinine, undemocratic caste that custom has built up.”

“And yet—­there must be discipline,” Katie murmured:  it seemed dreadful Wayne should be tearing down their house in that rude fashion, house in which they had dwelt so long, and so comfortably.

“Discipline is one thing.  Bullying’s another.  I’ve never been satisfied discipline couldn’t be enforced without snobbery.  To-day Solesby—­one year out of West Point!—­walked through a shop I was in.  He passed men working at their machines—­skilled mechanics, many of them men of intelligence, ideas, character—­as though he were passing so much cattle.  I wanted to take him by the neck and throw him out!”