“This is a country of big things—this Colorado of ours,” he went on, “and we little human insects have to grow and expand to fit it—do that, or be blotted out and lost in the shuffle. Doesn’t it make you feel that way?”
She nodded. Though she was far from realizing it, or had been, up to this moment, her two years of burden-carrying in Denver had changed her quite as much as his varied experiences and the breaking down of the barriers had changed him. Then, with a smile: “We were terrible tenderfoots two years ago, weren’t we?”
“It was a country of tenderfoots then; it still is, in a great measure. What a world of meaning there is crammed into that one coined word! We call this a new country; in reality, it is old—very old and wise and shrewdly discriminating. It sifts the grain from the chaff without mercy; and equally without mercy the chaff is scattered to the four winds. We are the new things; we who call ourselves the lords of creation! Most of us were mere babes in the wood when we came here—tenderfoots in all that the word implies. At least, I am sure I was. You were different.”
“Not so very different,” she disagreed. “I remember how sneery and unmannerly I was the day we met on the train ... how I made fun of the ‘Philips,’ and told you you’d never go to the mountains. I don’t believe you ever quite forgave me for that.”
“The Philip you knew then was quite capable of holding it against you,” he admitted, with a reminiscent smile. “In fact, if I remember right, I believe he did cherish some boyish notion of showing you, some time, how completely mistaken you were; how far superior he was to your prejudiced opinion of him.”
She looked around at him with a flash of the old-time mockery in her eyes.
“Does he feel that way now?” she asked.
“Ah!” he returned quickly, “I think you know very well how he feels now. Harry has told you everything there was to tell, hasn’t he?”
She made the sign of assent, adding: “But only as a loyal friend, you may be sure.”
“Of course. Harry is incapable of disloyalty. What I am afraid of is that he was too loyal; that he hasn’t stood the thing upon its rightful feet. It wasn’t the finding of my father as—well, as I did find him, that smashed me, Jean.”