He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she looked back into the abyss.
"I wish I had such courage," he said with sudden, tense earnestness; "courage to master my revulsion against shadows."
"Perhaps it will come like an inspiration," she answered uncomprehendingly.
Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinking roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly persistence. Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set up housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had in a desert basin beside a water-course.
"The little pine has courage—the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It is worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. How green it is—greener than they!"
"But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to make controversy.
"Yes, out of the ease of their rich beds!"
"In a crowd and waiting for the axe!"
"And this one, in its isolation, creating something where there was nothing! Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out of the stubborn soil! And waiting all its life down there for the reward of a look and a word of praise!"
"But," he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in rebuttal, "the big pines give us the masts of ships and they build houses and furnish the kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!"