She stopped and looked at Hollister.

“I wonder if you think I’m a little mad?” she asked.

“No.  I was just wondering what it is about you that makes men want you,” he returned.

“You should know,” she answered bluntly.

“I never knew.  I was like Mills:  a victim of my emotions.  But one outgrows any feeling if it is clubbed hard enough.  I daresay all these things are natural enough, even if they bring misery in their wake.”

“I daresay,” she said.  “There is nothing unnatural in a man loving me, any more than it was unnatural for you to love Doris, or for Doris to have a son.  Still you are inclined to blame me for what I’ve done.  You seem to forget that the object of each individual’s existence, man or woman, is not to bestow happiness on some one else, but to seek it for themselves.”

“That sounds like Lawanne,” Hollister observed.

“It’s true, no matter who it sounds like,” she retorted.

“If you really believe that, you are certainly a fool to go on living with a man like Jim Bland,” Hollister declared.  It did not occur to him that he was displaying irritation.

“I’ve told you why and I do not see any reason for changing my idea,” she said coolly.  “When it no longer suits me to be a chattel, I shall cease to be one.  Meantime—­pax—­pax—­

“Where is Doris and the adorable infant?” Myra changed the subject abruptly.  “I don’t hear or see one or the other.”

“They were all out in the kitchen a minute ago, bathing the kid,” he told her, and Myra went on in.

Hollister’s work lay almost altogether in the flat now.  The cut cedar accumulating under the busy hands of six men came pouring down the chute in a daily stream.  To salvage the sticks that spilled, to arrange the booms for rafting down stream, kept Hollister on the move.  At noon that day Myra and Doris brought the baby and lunch in a basket and spread it on the ground on the sunny side of an alder near the chute mouth, just beyond the zone of danger from flying bolts.  The day was warm enough for comfortable lounging.  The boy, now grown to be a round-faced, clear-skinned mite with blue eyes like his father, lay on an outspread quilt, waving his chubby arms, staring at the mystery of the shadows cast upon him by leaf and branch above.

Hollister finished his meal in silence, that reflective silence which always overtook him when he found himself one corner of this strange triangle.  He could talk to Myra alone.  He was never at a loss for words with his wife.  Together, they struck him dumb.

And this day Doris seemed likewise dumb.  There was a growing strangeness about her which had been puzzling Hollister for days.  At night she would snuggle down beside him, quietly contented, or she would have some story to tell, or some unexpectedness of thought which still surprised him by its clear-cut and vigorous imagery.  But by day she grew distrait, as if she retreated into communion with herself, and her look was that of one striving to see something afar, a straining for vision.