Over the night fires their talk dug deeply into the abstractions, losing artificiality in just proportion to the cracking and peeling of the veneers.
"I am beginning to feel as though I had never touched the real realities before," was the way Prime expressed it at the close of a day in which they had run a fresh gamut of all the perils. "Life, the life that the vast majority of people thrive upon, will always seem ridiculously trivial and commonplace to me after this. I never understood before that civilization is chiefly an overlaying of extraneous things, and that, given a chance, it would disintegrate and fall away from us even as our civilized clothes are doing right now."
The young woman looked up with a quaint little grimace. She was trying to patch the frayed hem of her skirt, sewing with a thread drawn from one of the blankets and a clumsy needle Prime had fashioned for her out of a fish-bone.
"Please don't mention clothes," she begged. "If we had more of the deerskin I'd become a squaw at once. The fringes wouldn't look so bad if they were done in leather."
"Mere accessories," Prime declared, meaning the clothes. "Civilization prescribes them, their cut, fashion, and material. The buckskin Indians have the best of us in this, as in many other things."
"The realities?" she queried.
"The simplicities," he qualified. "Life as we have lived it, and as we shall probably live it again if we ever get out of this, is much too complex. We are learning how few the real necessities are, and it is good for the soul. I wouldn't take a fortune for what I've been learning in these weeks, Lucetta."
"I have been learning, too," she admitted.
"Other things besides the use of a paddle and a camp-fire?"
"Many other things. I have forgotten the world I knew best, and it is going to require a tremendous effort to remember it again when the need arises."