Ross Shanklin was stunned.  The vista shown him of human nature was unthinkable.  It had been his lot to live in a world of suspicion and hatred, of evil-believing and evil-doing.  It had been his experience, slouching along village streets at nightfall, to see little children, screaming with fear, run from him to their mothers.  He had even seen grown women shrink aside from him as he passed along the sidewalk.

He was aroused by the girl clapping her hands as she cried out.

“I know what you are!  You’re an open air crank.  That’s why you were sleeping here in the grass.”

He felt a grim desire to laugh, but repressed it.

“And that’s what tramps are—­open air cranks,” she continued.  “I often wondered.  Mamma believes in the open air.  I sleep on the porch at night.  So does she.  This is our land.  You must have climbed the fence.  Mamma lets me when I put on my climbers—­they’re bloomers, you know.  But you ought to be told something.  A person doesn’t know when they snore because they’re asleep.  But you do worse than that.  You grit your teeth.  That’s bad.  Whenever you are going to sleep you must think to yourself, ‘I won’t grit my teeth, I won’t grit my teeth,’ over and over, just like that, and by and by you’ll get out of the habit.

“All bad things are habits.  And so are all good things.  And it depends on us what kind our habits are going to be.  I used to pucker my eyebrows—­wrinkle them all up, but mamma said I must overcome that habit.  She said that when my eyebrows were wrinkled it was an advertisement that my brain was wrinkled inside, and that it wasn’t good to have wrinkles in the brain.  And then she smoothed my eyebrows with her hand and said I must always think smooth—­smooth inside, and smooth outside.  And do you know, it was easy.  I haven’t wrinkled my brows for ever so long.  I’ve heard about filling teeth by thinking.  But I don’t believe that.  Neither does mamma.”

She paused, rather out of breath.  Nor did he speak.  Her flow of talk had been too much for him.  Also, sleeping drunkenly, with open mouth, had made him very thirsty.  But, rather than lose one precious moment, he endured the torment of his scorching throat and mouth.  He licked his dry lips and struggled for speech.

“What is your name?” he managed at last.

“Joan.”

She looked her own question at him, and it was not necessary to voice it.

“Mine is Ross Shanklin,” he volunteered, for the first time in forgotten years giving his real name.

“I suppose you’ve travelled a lot.”

“I sure have, but not as much as I might have wanted to.”

“Papa always wanted to travel, but he was too busy at the office.  He never could get much time.  He went to Europe once with mamma.  That was before I was born.  It takes money to travel.”

Ross Shanklin did not know whether to agree with this statement or not.