Like a little gray veil the tired look fell again over her face. The man saw it and shuddered.
"Psychology is my subject at Varndon College, you know," she continued listlessly, "and so I suppose I'm rather specially interested in freakish mental things. Anyway—pink sashes or Noah's arks or enough sugar in your cocoa—I have a theory that no child ever does outgrow its ungratified legitimate desires; though subsequent maturity may bring him to the point where his original desire has reached such astounding proportions that the original object can no longer possibly appease it."
Reminiscently, her narrowing eyes turned back their inner vision to the far-away grotesque incident of the camp meeting. "It isn't as though a child asked for a thing the very first time that he thought of it," she protested a trifle pathetically. "An idea has been sown and has grown and germinated in his mind a pretty long time before he gets up his courage to speak to anybody about it. Oh, I tell you, sir, the time to grant anybody a favor is the day the favor is asked, for that day is the one psychological moment of the world when supply and demand are keyed exactly to each other's limits, and can be mated beatifically to grow old, or die young, together. But after that day—!
"Why, even with grown people," she added hastily. "Did you ever know a marriage to turn out to be specially successful where the man had courted a reluctant woman for years and years before she finally yielded to him? It's perfectly astonishing how soon a wife like that is forced to mourn: 'Why did he court me so long and so furiously if he really cared as little as this? I'm just exactly the same person that I was in the beginning!'—Yes, that's precisely the trouble. In the long time that she has kept her man waiting, she has remained just exactly the same small object that she was in the beginning, but the man's hunger for her has materialized and spiritualized and idealized a thousandfold beyond her paltry capacity to satisfy it."
"That's a funny way to look at it," mused Donas Guthrie.
"Is it?" said the young woman, a trifle petulantly. "It doesn't seem funny to me!"
Then to Guthrie's infinite astonishment and embarrassment the tears welled up suddenly into her eyes and she turned her head abruptly away and began to beat a nervous tattoo with one hand on the flimsy piazza railing.
In the moment's awkward silence that ensued, the little inn's clattery kitchen wafted up its pleasant, odorous, noon-day suggestion of coffee and bacon.
"W-h-e-w!" gloated Guthrie desperately, "but that smells good!"
"It doesn't smell good to me," said the young woman tartly.