Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/25

 {| (Except Saturday afternoon. Golf or squash, depending on the season.)
 * 4:30
 * Leave office.
 * 5:00 to 6:00
 * Exercise, Y. M. C. A.
 * Exercise, Y. M. C. A.
 * 6:00
 * Home to dress.
 * 8:00
 * Dine (Generally out).
 * 11:00
 * Bed and sleep.
 * }
 * 11:00
 * Bed and sleep.
 * }

Kay had managed to shoot this schedule to pieces. Not that she had tried to; rather sweet was the nearest she came to loving him. But it is one thing to put down eleven o'clock as the hour for sleep and another to achieve it, and Herbert was already behind his schedule considerably. He had dejected moments when he wondered if he would ever catch up.

So he followed Kay out onto the platform that morning, and resigned himself to dust, cinders and a wind which made his eyes water. He even, after a time, stated that he believed that, if water were put on the ground it would grow things. And Kay relaxed and even laughed.

"You are really a nice person, Herbert," she said.

He flushed. "Do you think that, Kay?" he asked, "or are you just saying it to please me?"

"I mean it."

He turned and looked at her.

"And that's all you do mean," he said, with unexpected shrewdness. "I see. Well"

He did not finish. Henry came out on the platform.

Kay was quite sure she recognized the river when they came to it, but it disappointed her. It flowed sluggishly between deep eroded banks, a narrow yellow stream in the center of a dried bed. There was nothing to tell her of what a river it was in the spring, when the snow on the distant mountains began to melt; how it spread incredibly and carried away bridges and what not, and how unwary cattle and even people sank then in its quicksands, and died.

"Imagine drinking that!" said Herbert as they rattled across the bridge.

"But suppose you had been eighty miles without water."

"Eighty! Why eighty?"

But she did not answer. She had somehow expected that