“I’ll look,” she said.
She would have gone into the city with him, but he objected: “You would have to come back alone!”
Their real parting was on the Palisades, and there were few words about it.
“It’s work, now,” he said. “We go opposite ways for the same job—the Story of the Age.”
“And after that—New York,” she answered.
They stood in the superb sunlight at the edge of the escarpment. Hundreds of feet below was the old abandoned bathhouse, and the three white lines of surf pressing into the land, like tireless fingers of a modeler upon the clay. To the left was the portal of the Canyon, to the right the fallow lands with feathery brushes of eucalyptus against the sky.
“We’re all meshed yet, Dicky—meshed in wantings and struggles, all tracked up with recent experiences. We can’t see each other clearly yet——”
He was looking into her face in half profile. Quietly it had dawned upon him that he couldn’t have spared a single one of the hard days of the past five years, not a single one of the black patches, even. They were the dark rooms in which this present striking film had been developed.
“We can’t—what?” he said strangely.
She was speaking, but still he didn’t hear, for that moment in the superb sunlight, he saw Pidge Musser as he had never seen her before.