once, a fair-haired girl about Stella’s age.  She proved an exceedingly self-contained young person, whose speech during the hour of her stay amounted to a dozen or so drawling sentences.  With no hint of condescension or superciliousness, she still managed to arouse in Stella a mild degree of resentment.  She wore an impeccable pongee silk, simple and costly, and her hands had evidently never known the roughening of work.  In one way and another Miss Benton straightway conceived an active dislike for Linda Abbey.  As her reception of Paul’s sister was not conducive to chumminess, Paul did not bring Linda again.

But he came oftener than Stella desired to be bothered with him.  Charlie was beginning to indulge in some rather broad joking, which offended and irritated her.  She was not in the least attracted to Paul Abbey.  He was a nice enough young man; for all she knew, he might be a concentration of all the manly virtues, but he gave no fillip to either her imagination or her emotions.  He was too much like a certain type of young fellow she had known in other embodiments.  Her instinct warned her that stripped of his worldly goods he would be wholly commonplace.  She could be friends with the Paul Abbey kind of man, but when she tried to consider him as a possible lover, she found herself unresponsive, even amused.  She was forced to consider it, because Abbey was fast approaching that stage.  It was heralded in the look of dumb appeal that she frequently surprised in his gaze, by various signs and tokens, that Stella Benton was too sophisticated to mistake.  One of these days he would lay his heart, and hand at her feet.

Sometimes she considered what her life might be if she should marry him.  Abbey was wealthy in his own right and heir to more wealth.  But—­she could not forbear a wry grimace at the idea.  Some fateful hour love would flash across her horizon, a living flame.  She could visualize the tragedy if it should be too late, if it found her already bound—­sold for a mess of pottage at her ease.  She did not mince words to herself when she reflected on this matter.  She knew herself as a creature of passionate impulses, consciously resenting all restraint.  She knew that men and women did mad things under the spur of emotion.  She wanted no shackles, she wanted to be free to face the great adventure when it came.

Yet there were times during the weeks that flitted past when it seemed to her that no bondage could be meaner, more repugnant, than that daily slavery in her brother’s kitchen; that transcendent conceptions of love and marriage were vain details by comparison with aching feet and sleep-heavy eyes, with the sting of burns, the smart of sweat on her face, all the never-ending trifles that so irritated her.  She had been spoiled in the making for so sordid an existence.  Sometimes she would sit amid the array of dishes and pans and cooking food and wonder if she really were the same being whose life had been made up of books and music, of teas and dinners and plays, of light, inconsequential chatter with genial, well-dressed folk.  There was no one to talk to here and less time to talk.  There was nothing to read except a batch of newspapers filtering into camp once a week or ten days.  There was not much in this monster stretch of giant timber but heat and dirt and flies and hungry men who must be fed.