"My last job," Thompson told her truthfully, "was washing cars, greasing up, and changing tires in a country garage down in the San Juan." He paused for a moment. "Before that I was chaperon to a stable full of horses on a Salinas ranch. I've tried being a carpenter's helper, an assistant gardener, understudy to a suburban plumber—and other things too numerous to mention—in the last three months. I think the most satisfactory thing I've tackled was the woods up north, last fall."
"You must have acquired experience, at least, even if none of those things proved an efficient method of making money," she returned lightly.
"A man like me," he remarked, "has first to learn how to make a living before he can set about making money."
"Making money is relative. Quite often it merely means making a living with an extended horizon," she observed. "I know a man with a ten-thousand-dollar salary who finds it a living, no more."
"Poor devil," he drawled sardonically. "When I get into the ten-thousand-a-year class I rather think it will afford me a few trifles beyond bare subsistence."
She smiled.
"Have you set that for a mark to shoot at?"
"I haven't set any limit," he replied. "I haven't got my sights adjusted yet."
"I can scarcely assure myself that you are really you," she said after a momentary silence. "I can't seem to disassociate you with Lone Moose and a blundering optimism, a mystical faith that the Lord would make things come out right if you only leaned on Him hard enough. Now your talk is flavored with both egotism and the bitterness of the cynic."
"How should a man talk?" he demanded. "Like a worm if he chance to be trodden on a few times? Does a man necessarily become cynical when he realizes that plugging from the bottom up is no child's play? As for egotism—Heaven knows you knocked that out of me pretty effectually when you left Lone Moose. You made me feel like a whipped puppy for months. I chucked myself out of the church because of that—that abased, disheartened feeling. For a year and a half I've been learning and discovering that life isn't a parlor game. Do you remember that letter you left with Cloudy Moon for me? I need only to recall a phrase here and there in that as a cure for incipient egotism. What do you think I should have become?" he flung at her, unconscious of the passion in his voice, "A poor thing glad of a ride in your car? Or a confirmed optimist in overalls?"