"Narcotic? Do you think the term's more appropriate?"
"I do. Narcotics, one understands, are insidious things. If you take them regularly, in small doses, they increase their hold on you until you become wrapped up in dreams and unrealities. If, however, you get too big a dose of them at the beginning, it leads to a vigorous revulsion. It's nature's warning and remedy."
"You're not flattering; but I almost fancy you're right."
"We are told that man was made to struggle—to use all his powers. If he rests too long beside the still backwaters of life, in fairy-like dales, they're apt to atrophy, and he finds himself slack and nerveless when he goes out to face the world again."
Evelyn nodded, for she had felt and striven against the insidious influence of which he spoke. She had now and then left the drowsy dale for a while; but the life of which she had then caught glimpses was equally sheltered—one possible only to the favored few. Even the echoes of the real tense struggle seldom passed its boundaries.
"But you confessed not long ago that you loved the western wilderness," she said. "You have spent a good deal of time in it; and you expect to do so again. After all, isn't that only exchanging one beautiful, tranquil region for another? The bush must be even quieter than the English dales."
"Perhaps I haven't made the point quite clear. When one goes up into the bush, it's not to lounge and dream there, but to make war upon it with ax and drill."
He pulled up his team and pointed to the clump of giant trees.
"Look there! That's nature's challenge to man in this country."
Evelyn recognized that it was an impressive one. The great trunks ran up far aloft, tremendous columns, before their brighter portions were lost in the vaulted roof of somber greenery. They dwarfed the rig and team; she felt herself a pygmy by comparison.