Page looked extremely nettled.  An annoyed flush showed through the tan of his clear skin.  He was evidently very touchy about his pet lumbering operations.  “A great many American families consider that a sufficient income,” he said stiffly.

Sylvia had another inspiration, such as had been the genesis of her present walking-costume.  “You’re too silly, Arnold.  The important thing isn’t what the proportion with Mr. Page’s own income is!  What he was trying to do, and what he has done, only you don’t know enough to see it, is to prove that sane forestry is possible for forest-owners of small means.  I know, if you don’t, that two thousand is plenty to live on.  My father’s salary is only twenty-four hundred now, and we were all brought up when it was two thousand.”

She had had an intuitive certainty that this frank revelation would please Page, and she was rewarded by an openly ardent flash from his clear eyes.  There was in his look at her an element of enchanted, relieved recognition, as though he had nodded and said:  “Oh, you are my kind of a woman after all!  I was right about you.”

Arnold showed by a lifted eyebrow that he was conscious of being put down, but he survived the process with his usual negligent obliviousness of reproof.  “Well, if two thousand a year produced Judith, go ahead, Page, and my blessing on you!” He added in a half-apology for his offensive laughter, “It just tickled me to hear a man who owns most of several counties of coal-mines so set up over finding a nickel on the street!”

Page had regained his geniality.  “Well, Smith, maybe I needn’t have jumped so when you stepped on my toe.  But it’s my pet toe, you see.  You’re quite right—­I’m everlastingly set up over my nickel.  But it’s not because I found it.  It’s because I earned it.  It happens to be the only nickel I ever earned.  It’s natural I should want it treated with respect.”

Arnold did not trouble to make any sense out of this remark, and Sylvia was thinking bitterly to herself:  “But that’s pure bluff!  I’m not his kind of a woman.  I’m Felix Morrison’s kind!” No comment, therefore, was made on the quaintness of the rich man’s interest in earning capacity.

They were now in one of the recent pine plantations, treading a wood-road open to the sky, running between acres and acres of thrifty young pines.  Page’s eyes glistened with affection as he looked at them, and with the unwearied zest of the enthusiast he continued expanding on his theme.  Sylvia knew the main outline of her new subject now, felt that she had walked all around it, and was agreeably surprised at her sympathy with it.  She continued with a genuine curiosity to extract more details; and like any man who talks of a process which he knows thoroughly, Page was wholly at the mercy of a sympathetic listener.  His tongue tripped itself in his readiness to answer, to expound, to tell his experiences, to pour out a confidently