white man -- all with an eye to sustenance, and
finding it, and remaining."

Stephen's eyes swept around the desert absently.
He knew -- this young man -- that he was
in the presence of a personality. For he could not
help but draw comparisons between the young
woman beside him and the young women of his
acquaintance in the East. While he had found
Eastern girls vivacious, and attractive with a kind
of surface charm, never had he known one to take
so quiet and unassuming an outlook upon so
broad a theme. It was the desert, he told himself.
Here beside him was a type unknown to him, and
one so different from any he had as yet met with,
he felt himself ill at ease in her presence -- a thing
new to him, too -- and which in itself gave him
cause to marvel. Yes, it was the desert. It _must_
be the desert! In this slender girl beside him he
saw a person of insight and originality, a girl assuredly
not more than twenty years of age, attractive,
and thoroughly feminine. How ever did
they do it?

He harked back in his thoughts to her theory.
And he dwelt not so much upon the theory itself
as upon her manner of advancing it. Running
back over these things, recalling the music of her
voice, together with her spoken musings, he came
to understand why, with that first encounter, he
had found himself almost instantly curious concerning
desert folk. Not that he had known why
at the time, or had given that phase of it consideration.
He did remember that he had been

[[117]]

p116 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p117w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p118

v?