With a definite thud the tilting leg of Guthrie's chair came whacking down on the piazza floor.
"Why, you inconsistent little gourmand!" he exclaimed. "Then why did you give 'one perfectly good dinner' a place on your list of necessities?"
"I don't know," whispered the young woman, a trifle tremulously. Then abruptly she burst out laughing, and the face that she turned to Guthrie again was all deliciously mussed up like a child's, with tears and smiles and breeze-blown wisps of hair.
"That dinner item was just another silly thing," she explained half bashfully, half defiantly. "It's only that although I practically never eat much of anything on ordinary occasions, whenever I get into any kind of danger, whenever the train runs off the track, or the steamer threatens to sink, or my car gets stuck in the subway, I'm seized with the most terrific gnawing hunger—as though—as though—" Furiously the red flushed into her face again. "Well—eternity sounds so l-long," she stammered, "and I have a perfect horror, somehow—of going to Heaven—on an empty stomach."
In mutual appreciation of a suddenly relaxed tension, the man's laughter and the woman's rang out together throughout the dooryard and startled a grazing pony into a whimpering whinny of sympathy.
"I knew you'd think my list was funny," protested the young woman. "I knew perfectly well that every single individual item on it would astonish you."
Meditatively Donas Guthrie refilled his pipe and evidently illuminated both the tobacco and the situation with the same match.
"It isn't the things that are on your list that astonish me," he remarked puffingly. "It's the things that aren't on it that have given me the bit of a jolt."
"Such as what?" frowned the young woman, sliding jerkily out to the edge of her chair.
"Why, I'd always supposed that women were inherently domestic," growled Guthrie. "I'd always somehow supposed that Love and Home would figure pretty largely on any woman's 'List of Necessities.' But you! For Heaven's sake, haven't you ever even thought of man in any specific relation to your own life?"