“If I can’t fully agree with you, I can at least admire your point of view,” she said amiably.  “Is it Western—­or merely human?”

He laughed.

“Shall we assume that the one implies the other?  That would be in accordance with your point of view, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes; but it would be a distinct reversal of yours.  Truth belongs to another and simpler time than ours.  We are conventional first and everything else afterward.”

“Are we?” he queried.  “Some few hundreds or thousands of us may be; but for the remainder of our eighty-odd millions the conventions are things to be put on and off like Sunday garments.  And even the chosen few of us brush them aside upon occasion; ignore them utterly, as we two are ignoring them at this moment.”

She proved his assertion by continuing to talk to him, and the dining-car was emptying itself when they realized that there is an end even to a most leisurely dinner.  Ford paid the steward as they left the car, but in the Pullman he went back to first principles and insisted upon some kind of a definite accounting for the lost purse.

“Now you will tell me now much I threw away for you, and I’ll pay my debt,” he said, when she had hospitably made room for him in the opposing seat of her section.

“Indeed, you will do nothing of the kind!” she asserted.  “You will give me your card—­we’re going back to the conventions now—­and when we reach the city you may lend me enough money to take me up-town.  And to-morrow morning my brother will pay you back.”

He gave in because he had to.

“You are much more lenient than I deserve.  Really, you ought to stick me good and hard for my awkwardness.  It would serve me right.”

“I am considering the motive,” she said almost wistfully, he fancied.  “We have drifted very far from all those quiet anchorages of courtesy and helpfulness.  If we lived simpler lives—­”

He smiled at the turn she was giving it.

“Are you, too, bitten with the fad of the moment, ’the simple life’?” he asked.  “Let me assure you that it is beautiful only when you can look down upon it from the safe altitude of a comfortable income.  I know, because I’ve been living it for the past two years.”

She looked as if she were sorry for him.

“That is rank heresy!” she declared.  “Our forefathers had the better of us in many ways, and their simpler manner of living was one of them.  They had time for all the little courtesies and kindnesses that make life truly worth living.”

Ford’s laugh was boyishly derisive.

“Yes; they certainly had plenty of time; but they didn’t have much else.  Why, just think, for a moment, of what our own America would be if merely one of the modern civilizers, the railroads, had never existed.  There simply wouldn’t be any America, as we know it now.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because it is so.  For nearly two centuries we stood still, because there were no means of locomotion—­which is another word for progress and civilization.  But in less than fifty years after the first railroad was built we had become a great nation.”