Sophie shoved the opposite door open.

“Get in,” she let a flavor of reproof creep into her tone.  “Don’t talk that sort of nonsense.”

Thompson hesitated.  He was suddenly uncomfortable, conscious of his dusty clothes somewhat the worse for wear, his shoes from which the pristine freshness had long vanished, the day-old stubble on his chin.  There was a depressing contrast between his outward condition and that of the smartly dressed girl whose gray eyes were resting curiously on him now.

“Do you make a practice of picking up tramps along the road?” he parried with an effort at lightness.  He wanted to refuse outright, yet could not utter the words.  “I’m not very presentable.”

“Get in.  Don’t be silly,” she said impatiently.  “You don’t think I’ve become a snob just because chance has pitchforked me into the ranks of the idle rich, do you?”

Thompson laughed awkwardly.  There was real feeling in her tone, as if she had read correctly his hesitation and resented it.  After all, why not?  It would merely be an incident to Sophie Carr, and it would save him some hot and dusty miles.  He got in.

“I’m quite curious to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing for the last year,” she said, when the red car was once more rolling toward the city at a sedate pace.  “And by the way, where did you learn to change a tire so smartly?”

“My last job,” Thompson told her truthfully, “was washing cars, greasing up, and changing tires in a country garage down in the San Juan.”  He paused for a moment.  “Before that I was chaperon to a stable full of horses on a Salinas ranch.  I’ve tried being a carpenter’s helper, an assistant gardener, understudy to a suburban plumber—­and other things too numerous to mention—­in the last three months.  I think the most satisfactory thing I’ve tackled was the woods up north, last fall.”

“You must have acquired experience, at least, even if none of those things proved an efficient method of making money,” she returned lightly.

“A man like me,” he remarked, “has first to learn how to make a living before he can set about making money.”

“Making money is relative.  Quite often it merely means making a living with an extended horizon,” she observed.  “I know a man with a ten-thousand-dollar salary who finds it a living, no more.”

“Poor devil,” he drawled sardonically.  “When I get into the ten-thousand-a-year class I rather think it will afford me a few trifles beyond bare subsistence.”

She smiled.

“Have you set that for a mark to shoot at?”

“I haven’t set any limit,” he replied.  “I haven’t got my sights adjusted yet.”

“I can scarcely assure myself that you are really you,” she said after a momentary silence.  “I can’t seem to disassociate you with Lone Moose and a blundering optimism, a mystical faith that the Lord would make things come out right if you only leaned on Him hard enough.  Now your talk is flavored with both egotism and the bitterness of the cynic.”