She drew a deep breath.  “I don’t want to go back where I have to breathe the same air he does.”

“Judith, what did he do?” Doug’s lips were stiff and his eyes contracted as if with pain.

“I didn’t give him a chance to do anything.  I don’t want even to talk about it.”

Douglas sat silent for a moment; then he said huskily, “I’m ashamed of him.”

Suddenly Judith put her hands before her eyes and began to sob.  Douglas groaned.  He put his arms about her and presently she leaned against him and wept with complete abandonment.  Finally she began to talk.

“He’s always worried me, a little—­but I wasn’t really afraid of him.  I don’t want to think about him—­or talk about him—­to anybody.  Up till Saturday night he was just one of the hard things that heckled me—­I didn’t have anybody to go to.  If I went to you, you’d want to—­marry me.  And—­Inez—­Inez has gone back on all the ideas she got me to believe.  She’s gone—­and fallen in love—­with Peter!  She—­she told me not long ago that she was going to do everything she could to make him marry her.—­Just as soon as something touched her selfish interests she went to pieces.—­I want to get away from Lost Chief!”

Douglas patted her shoulder in silence.  It was inexpressibly sweet to have her there.

“A girl has a brain, as well as a man,” she went on.  “She doesn’t want to be just a servant to a rough old rancher.  She wants to live by her brain as well as he does.  What’s the use of a woman being fine if that’s all her fineness comes to?  You can say she hands it on to her children.  But she don’t.  It’s something she acquires and it’s lost—­in the scrubbing pail.”

Douglas listened with the whole of his mind.  Judith’s sobs had ceased now, and she went on, slowly.  “It’s not that I’m against children.  I’d love to have a half a dozen babies.  But what I am against is giving all that is in me—­the brain side of me, to something that demands only a small part of my brain.  I want a life like a man’s and a woman’s too, that makes me give all, all.  Surely I can find a place somewhere where I can give that.”

Douglas drew an uncertain breath.  The Mormon woman had known.  A sense of his own inadequacy settled on him like a cloud.

“I know you think I’m a fool.  Yet you have big dreams for yourself or you wouldn’t have felt as you have about the preacher.  One has to have an ideal to live by.  I thought Inez had given me one and—­” with a sob that shook her whole fine body—­“I don’t see how it can work out!”

“I suppose,” said Douglas, in his gentle voice, “that folks have been trying out Inez’ idea ever since love began, and the homely, every-day details of living make it impossible.”

Judith drew a long breath and was silent.

“And so,” said Douglas, “you are through with love and marriage.  Yet no human being can be happy without both.  Life is like that.”