"Oh," she said, "I'm glad you stopped me! I haven't seen a wild deer before."
"They are hard to see," Jim replied. "If they're standing, they melt into their background at a very short distance. However, I didn't like the way that deer was going. It passed pretty close, without seeing we were about."
Noting that the scramble had tired her, he began to rub his ax with a sharpening stone, and Carrie mused while she got her breath. By and by she looked up and saw his twinkling glance.
"Yes," she said, "I was thinking rather hard; I thought it was good for me to come North. All was always just the same at the store; the dull street, the mean frame houses, and the stale smell of groceries. There was nothing different; you knew you would do to-morrow what you did to-day, and you had made no progress when the reckoning came. If there was money enough to pay the bills, you were satisfied, and sometimes there was not. But I really mean you felt you had made no progress of any kind; you were slipping back."
"Slipping back? I'm not sure I get that——"
"Sometimes it's hard to put you wise, but perhaps slipping back wasn't altogether right. I meant things were moving on and leaving me behind. The time I could be happy was going and soon I'd be old and sour. I didn't want to feel I'd done nothing and had never tasted life. Well, my chance came and I pulled out."
"I'm afraid you haven't had your good time yet," Jim remarked.
Carrie's eyes sparkled. "One always wants something better, Jim, but I've begun to live. I've seen the woods and the wild back country; I'm helping at a big job."
"Your help is worth much, and if we put the job over, you can have the things a girl is supposed to like; for example, pretty clothes, opera tickets, a holiday at a fashionable summer hotel. They're things you ought to have."
"I do like pretty clothes and think I'd like to meet smart people. The trouble is, they would know I didn't belong where they belonged and might leave me out. Do you think that would happen, Jim?"