To both Helen and her father, tarrying at Desert Valley Ranch, the long, still, hot days were fraught with much new interest. Life was new and golden, viewed from this fresh viewpoint. Helen had come hitherward from her city haunts with trepidation; even Longstreet, serenely optimistic regarding the ultimate crown of success to his labour, was genuinely delighted. The days passed all too swiftly.
As can in no way be held reprehensible in one of her age and maidenly beauty and charm, Helen's interest had to do primarily with men, two men. They, quite as should be in this land of novelty, were unlike the men she had known. With each passing hour Helen came to see this more clearly. She was a bright young woman, alert and with at least a modicum of scientific mental attitude inherited from the machinery of her father's brain. Like any other healthy young animal, she wanted to know whys and wherefores and the like.
The evening of their first day, alone in her room for an hour before bed, she settled for herself the first difference between these men of the desert fringes and the men she had known at home. To begin with, she reviewed in mind her old acquaintances: there were a half-dozen professors, instructors, assistants who called infrequently on her father and whom she had come to know with a degree of familiarity. The youngest of them had been twenty years older than Helen, and, whereas her father was always an old dear, sometimes a hopeless and helpless old dear, they were simply old fogies. They constituted, however, an important department in her male friends; the rest were as easily catalogued. They were the young college men--men in name only, boys in actuality. They were of her own age or two or four years older or a year younger. They danced and made mysterious references to the beer they had wickedly drunk; they motored in their fathers' cars and played tennis in their fathers' flannels when they fitted; no doubt they were men in the making, but to judge them as men already was like looking prematurely into the oven to see how the bread was doing; they were still under-baked. So far they were playing with the game of life; life, herself, had not yet taken them seriously, had not reached out the iron hand that eventually would seize them by the back of the neck, the slack of the trousers, and pitch them out into the open arena.
Helen was considerably pleased with the result of her meditations: her father's academic friends had held back behind college walls and thus had never come out into the scrimmage that makes men; her own young friends had not yet reached the time when they would buckle on their armour and mount and talk lance in hand. Alan Howard and John Carr were men who for a number of years had done man's work out in the open, no doubt giving and receiving doughty blows. She considered Carr: he had taken a monster outfit like Desert Valley and had made it over, in his own image, like a god working. There were thousands of acres, she had no idea how many. There were cattle and horses and mules; again she thought of them only vaguely as countless. There were many men obeying his orders, taking his daily wage. Carr had mastered a big job and the job had made a masterly man of him. Then had come Alan Howard with vision and determination and courage. He had expended almost his last cent for a first payment upon the huge property; he was risking all that he had gathered of the world's goods, he was out in the open waging his battle like a young king claiming his heritage. Helen clothed the act in the purple and gold of romance and thrilled at her own picture.