Sylvia took off her hat, rolled up her sleeves, and began on vigorous ablutions.  She had laughed, yes, and heartily, but in her complicated many-roomed heart a lively pique rubbed shoulders with her mirth, and her merriment was tinctured with a liberal amount of the traditional feminine horrified disgust at having been uncomely, at having unconsciously been subjected to an indignity.  She was determined that no slightest stain should remain on her smooth, fine-textured skin.  She felt, as a pretty woman always feels, that her personality was indissolubly connected with her looks, and it was a symbolic act which she performed as she fiercely scrubbed her face with the yellow soap till its acrid pungency blotted out for her the woodland aroma of moist earth and green leaves.  She dashed the cold water up on her cheeks till the spattering drops gleamed like crystals on the crisp waviness of her ruddy brown hair.  She washed her hands and arms in the icy mountain water till they were red with the cold, hot though the day was.  She was chilled, and raw with the crude astringency of the soap, but she felt cleansed to the marrow of her bones, as though there had been some mystic quality in this lustration in running water, performed under the open sky.  The racy, black-birch tang still lingering on her tongue was a flavor quite in harmony with this severely washed feeling.  It was a taste notably clean.

She looked across the brook at her companion, now sitting back on his heels, and saw that there had emerged from his grime a thin, tanned, high-nosed face, topped by drab-colored hair of no great abundance and lighted by a pair of extraordinarily clear, gray eyes.  She perceived no more in the face at that moment, because the man, as he looked up at her, became nothing but a dazzled mirror from which was reflected back to her the most flattering image of her own appearance.  Almost actually she saw herself as she appeared to him, a wood-nymph, kneeling by the flowing water, vital, exquisite, strong, radiant in a cool flush, her uncovered hair gleaming in a thousand loosened waves.  Like most comely women of intelligence Sylvia was intimately familiar with every phase of her own looks, and she knew down to the last blood-corpuscle that she had never looked better.  But almost at once came the stab that Felix Morrison was not the man who was looking at her, and the heartsick recollection that he would never again be there to see her.  Her moment of honest joy in being lovely passed.  She stood up with a clouded face, soberly pulled down her sleeves, and picked up her hat.

“Oh, why don’t you leave it off?” said the man across the brook.  “You’d be so much more comfortable!” She knew that he meant her hair was too pretty to cover, and did not care what he meant.  “All right, I’ll carry it,” she assented indifferently.