“May I?” she inquired, stretching her hand in the direction of a sheet.
“Sure,” said Peter.
“What is it?” inquired Linda lightly. “The bridge or the road or the playroom?”
“Gad!” he said slowly. “Don’t talk about me being a rock! Rocks are stolid, stodgy unresponsive things. I thought I was struggling with one of the biggest political problems of the day from an economic and psychological standpoint. If I’d had sense enough to realize that it was a bridge I was building, I might have done the thing with some imagination and subtlety. If you want a rock and you say I am a rock, a rock I’ll be, Linda. But I know what you are, and what you will be to me when we really become the kind of friends we are destined to be.”
“I wonder now,” said Linda, “if you are going to say that I could be any such lovely thing on the landscape as a bridge.”
“No,” said Peter slowly, “nothing so prosaic. Bridges are common in this world. You are going to be something uncommon. History records the experiences of but one man who has seen a flame in the open. I am a second Moses and you are going to be my burning bush. I intended to read this article to you.”
Peter massed the sheets, straightened them on the desk, and deliberately ripped them across several times. Linda sprang to her feet and stretched out her hands.
“Why, Peter!” she cried in a shocked voice. “That is perfectly inexcusable. There are hours and hours of work on that, and I have not a doubt but that it was good work.”
“Simple case of mechanism,” said Peter, reducing the bits to smaller size and dropping them into the empty nail keg that served as his wastebasket. “A lifeless thing without a soul, mere clock-work. I have got the idea now. I am to build a bridge and make a road. Every way I look I can see a golden-flame tongue of inspiration burning. I’ll rewrite that thing and animate it. Take me for a ride, Linda.”
Linda rose and walked to the Bear-cat. Peter climbed in and sat beside her. Linda laid her hands on the steering wheel and started the car. She ran it down to the highway and chose a level road leading straight down the valley through cultivated country. In all the world there was nothing to equal the panorama that she spread before Peter that evening. She drove the Bear-cat past orchards, hundreds of acres of orchards of waxen green leaves and waxen white bloom of orange, grapefruit, and lemon. She took him where seas of pink outlined peach orchards, and other seas the more delicate tint of the apricots. She glided down avenues lined with palm and eucalyptus, pepper and olive, and through unbroken rows, extending for miles, of roses, long stretches of white, again a stretch of pink, then salmon, yellow, and red. Nowhere in all the world are there to be found so many acres of orchard bloom and so many miles of tree-lined, rose-decorated roadway as in southern California. She sent the little car through the evening until she felt that it was time to go home, and when at last she stopped where they had started, she realized that neither she nor Peter had spoken one word. As he stepped from the car she leaned toward him and reached out her hand.