Her narrow eyes met his sombrously.  On either side it was a glance of curiosity, of scrutiny.  She, as usual, made no effort to begin a conversation, and he, searching for a polite commonplace, said presently: 

“Have you ever been in Colina before?”

“Often, but not in the last two years,” she answered tonelessly, “not since you’ve been here, I guess.  I hate the mountains.”

“I have been here nearly two years,” he vouchsafed, “and I feel as if I would never go away.  But you live in the desert, don’t you?”

“Sometimes, that is, when I’m not out on the road.  The desert is the place.  You can breathe there, you can live there,” there was a passionate vibration in her voice, “but these old, cold mountains make you feel all the time as if they were going to fall on you and crush you.”

“Do they make you feel that way?” He pulled his chair nearer to her so that his back was turned to the two men, and Jose, who saw everything, smiled faintly, mordaciously.  “How strange!” It was not a conventional expression, he seemed really to find it strange, unbelievably so.

“And you, how do they make you feel?” she asked wearily, a touch of scorn in her glance.

A light seemed to glow over his face.  “Ah, I do not know that I can tell you,” he said, and she was conscious of some immediate change in him, which she apprehended but could never have defined.  It was as if he had withdrawn mentally to incalculable distances.

Pearl did not notice his evasion; she was not interested in his view of the mountains.  What she instinctively resented, even in her dulled state, was his impersonal attitude toward herself.  She was not used to it from any man.  She did not understand it.  She wondered, without any particular interest in the matter, but still following her instinctive and customary mode of thought, if he had not noticed that she was beautiful.  Was he so stupid that he did not think her so?  But there was no hint in his manner or look in his eyes of an intention on his part of playing the inevitable game, even a remembrance of it seemed as lacking as desire.  The game of challenge and elusion on her part, of perpetual and ever more ardent advance on his.  He was interested, she knew that, but, as she felt with a surge of surprise, not in the way she had always encountered and had learned to expect.

“Isn’t it strange,” she realized that he was speaking again, “that I haven’t been drawn to the desert, because so many have had to turn to it?  I have only seen it from traveling across it, and then it repelled me, perhaps it frightened me.”  He seemed to consider this.

For the moment Pearl forgot the inevitable game.  “Frightened you!” she cried.  “It is the mountains that frighten me; but the desert is always different.  It—­” she struggled for expression, “it is always you.”

Something in this seemed to strike him.  “Perhaps I have that to learn.”  Again he meditated a few moments, then looked up with a smile.  “You must tell me all that you find in the desert and I will tell you all that I find in the mountains.  It will be jolly to talk to a woman again.”  He spoke with a satisfaction thoroughly genuine.