Frona nodded her identity, hesitated, and looked at the woman with secret intentness.  She was conscious of a great and pardonable curiosity, of a frank out-reaching for fuller knowledge.  This creature, so like, so different; old as the oldest race, and young as the last rose-tinted babe; flung far as the farthermost fires of men, and eternal as humanity itself—­where were they unlike, this woman and she?  Her five senses told her not; by every law of life they were no; only, only by the fast-drawn lines of social caste and social wisdom were they not the same.  So she thought, even as for one searching moment she studied the other’s face.  And in the situation she found an uplifting awfulness, such as comes when the veil is thrust aside and one gazes on the mysteriousness of Deity.  She remembered:  “Her feet take hold of hell; her house is the way to the grave, going down to the chamber of death,” and in the same instant strong upon her was the vision of the familiar gesture with which the woman’s hand had gone out in mute appeal, and she looked aside, out over the dreary endless white, and for her, too, the day became filled with sadness.

She gave an involuntary, half-nervous shiver, though she said, naturally enough, “Come, let us walk on and get the blood moving again.  I had no idea it was so cold till I stood still.”  She turned to the dogs:  “Mush-on!  King!  You Sandy!  Mush!” And back again to the woman, “I am quite chilled, and as for you, you must be—­”

“Quite warm, of course.  You have been running and your clothes are wet against you, while I have kept up the needful circulation and no more.  I saw you when you leaped off the sled below the hospital and vanished down the river like a Diana of the snows.  How I envied you!  You must enjoy it.”

“Oh, I do,” Frona answered, simply.  “I was raised with the dogs.”

“It savors of the Greek.”

Frona did not reply, and they walked on in silence.  Yet Frona wished, though she dared not dare, that she could give her tongue free rein, and from out of the other’s bitter knowledge, for her own soul’s sake and sanity, draw the pregnant human generalizations which she must possess.  And over her welled a wave of pity and distress; and she felt a discomfort, for she knew not what to say or how to voice her heart.  And when the other’s speech broke forth, she hailed it with a great relief.

“Tell me,” the woman demanded, half-eagerly, half-masterly, “tell me about yourself.  You are new to the Inside.  Where were you before you came in?  Tell me.”

So the difficulty was solved, in a way, and Frona talked on about herself, with a successfully feigned girlhood innocence, as though she did not appreciate the other or understand her ill-concealed yearning for that which she might not have, but which was Frona’s.

“There is the trail you are trying to connect with.”  They had rounded the last of the cliffs, and Frona’s companion pointed ahead to where the walls receded and wrinkled to a gorge, out of which the sleds drew the firewood across the river to town.  “I shall leave you there,” she concluded.