"Oh, your haberdashery isn't in New York?"
"My haber—er—well—no; that is, I don't depend on the—er—trade entirely. I'm a sort of a kind of a chemist, too."
"In a college?" inquired the young lady, whose impressions of chemistry as a pursuit were derived chiefly from her schooldays.
"Mainly in mining-camps. Far out of the world. That's why I don't know who you and your father are."
"Don't you really? Well, never mind us. Tell me more about your work," she besought, setting the feminine pitfall—half unconsciously—into which trapper and prey so often walk hand in hand.
He answered in the words duly made and provided for such occasions: "Not much to tell," and, as the natural sequence, proceeded to tell it, encouraged by her interested eyes, at no small length.
Little Miss Grouch was genuinely entertained. From the young men whom she knew she had heard sundry tales of the wild, untamed portions of our country, but these gilded ones had peeked into such places from the windows of transcontinental trains, or lingered briefly in them on private-car junkets, or used them as bases of supply for luxurious hunting-trips. Here was a youth—he looked hardly more—who had gone out in dead earnest and fought the far and dry West for a living, and, as nearly as she could make out from this gray-eyed Othello's modest narrative, had won his battle all along the line.
I am violating no confidence in stating that this was the beginning of trouble for Little Miss Grouch, though she was far from appreciating her danger at the time, or of realizing that her dire design of vengeance was becoming diluted with a very different sentiment.
"So," concluded the narrator, "here I am, a tenderfoot of the ocean, having marketed my ore-reducing process for a sufficient profit to give me a vacation, and also to permit of my buying a little old house on the Battery."
"I'm sorry," said Little Miss Grouch, imitatively.