Again she smiled.  “You’ll know what it is some day.”

“Is it contagious?” he asked solicitously.

“Don’t be alarmed.  I haven’t it.  Not now.  I’d love to stay on and on and just ‘breathe and wait,’ if the gods were good.”

‘"Dream that the gods are good,’” he echoed.  “The last thing they ever think of being according to my reading.”

She capped his line;

“We twain, once well in sunder, What will the mad gods do—­’”

she began; then broke off, jumping to her feet.  “I’m talking sheer nonsense!” she cried.  “Take me for a walk in the woods.  The desert glares to-day.”

“I’ll have to be back by twelve,” he said.  “Excuse me just a moment.”

He disappeared into the portable house.  When he rejoined her, she asked: 

“What did you go in there for?  To get your revolver?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve carried one since the day you told me to.  Not that I’ve met a soul that looked dangerous, nor that I’d know how to shoot or when, if I did.”

“The sight of it would be taken as evidence that you knew how to use it,” he assured her.

For a time, as they walked, she had many questions to put about the tree and bird life surrounding them.  In the midst of it he asked her: 

“Do you ever get restless?”

“I haven’t, here.  I’m getting rested.”

“And at home I suppose you’re too busy.”

“Being busy is no preventive.  Somebody has said that St. Vitus is the patron saint of New York society.”

“It must take almost all the time those people have to keep up with the theaters and with the best in poetry and what’s being done and thought, and the new books and all that,” he surmised.

“I beg your pardon; what was that about poetry and books?”

“Girls like you—­society girls, I mean—­read everything there is, don’t they?”

“Where do you get that extraordinary idea?”

“Why, from knowing you.”

“My poor, innocent Ban!  If you were to try and talk books and poetry, ‘Shakespeare and the musical glasses,’ to the average society girl, as you call her, what do you suppose would happen?”

“Why, I suppose I’d give myself away as an ignoramus.”

“Heaven save you for a woolly lambkin!  The girl would flee, shrieking, and issue a warning against you as a high-brow, a prig, and a hopeless bore.  They don’t read books, except a few chocolate-cream novels.  They haven’t the time.”

“But you—­”

“Oh, I’m a freak!  I get away with it because I’m passably good-looking and know how to dress, and do what I please by the divine right of—­well, of just doing it.  But, even so, a lot of the men are rather afraid of me in their hearts.  They suspect the bluestocking.  Let ’em suspect!  The market is plenty good enough,” declared Io flippantly.

“Then you just took up books as a sort of freak; a side issue?” The disappointment in his face was almost ludicrous.