young city."

"Hosford is almost as good a boomer as Mr. Cortwright. Everybody knows that."

"Yes. I guess Mirapolis will have to grow a good bit more before Congress can be made to take notice," was the hydrographer's dictum. "Isn't that your notion?"

Brouillard was shaking his head slowly.

"I don't pretend to have opinions any more, Grizzy. I'm living from day to day. If the tail should get big enough to wag the dog——"

They were in the middle of the high staging upon which the puddlers worked while filling the forms and Grislow stopped short.

"What's come over you, lately, Victor? I won't say you're half-hearted, but you're certainly not the same driver you were a few weeks ago, before the men quit calling you 'Hell's-Fire.'"

Brouillard smiled grimly. "It's going to be a long job, Grizzy. Perhaps I saw that I couldn't hope to keep keyed up to concert pitch all the way through. Call it that, anyway. I've promised to motor Miss Cortwright to the upper dam this afternoon, and it's time to go and do it."

It was not until they were climbing down from the staging at the Jack's Mountain approach that Grislow acquired the ultimate courage of his convictions.

"Going motoring, you said—with Miss Genevieve. That's another change. I'm beginning to believe in your seven-year hypothesis. You are no longer a woman-hater."

"I never was one. There isn't any such thing."

"You used to make believe there was and you posed that way last summer. Think I don't remember how you were always ranting about the dignity of a man's work and quoting Kipling at me? Now you've taken to mixing and mingling like a social reformer."

"Well, what of it?" half-absently.

"Oh, nothing; only it's interesting from a purely academic point of view. I've been wondering how far you are responsible; how much you really do, yourself, and how much is done for you."

Brouillard's laugh was skeptical.

"That's another leaf out of your psychological book, I suppose. It's rot."

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