“Thea,” said Fred Ottenburg one drizzly¹ afternoon in April, while they sat waiting for their tea at a restaurant in the Pullman Building, overlooking the lake, “what are you going to do this summer?”  
“I don’t know. Work, I suppose.”
 
“With Bowers², you mean? Even Bowers goes fishing for a month. Chicago’s no place to work, in the summer. Haven’t you made any plans?”
 
Thea shrugged³ her shoulders. “No use having any plans when you haven’t any money. They are unbecoming.”
 
“Aren’t you going home?”
 
She shook her head. “No. It won’t be comfortable there till I’ve got something to show for myself. I’m not getting on at all, you know. This year has been mostly wasted.”
 
“You’re stale; that’s what’s the matter with you. And just now you’re dead tired. You’ll talk more rationally after you’ve had some tea. Rest your throat until it comes.” They were sitting by a window. As Ottenburg looked at her in the gray light, he remembered what Mrs. Nathanmeyer had said about the Swedish face “breaking early.” Thea was as gray as the weather. Her skin looked sick. Her hair, too, though on a damp day it curled charmingly about her face, looked pale.
 
Fred beckoned⁴ the waiter and increased his order for food. Thea did not hear him. She was staring out of the window, down at the roof of the Art Institute and the green lions, dripping in the rain. The lake was all rolling mist, with a soft shimmer⁵ of robin’s-egg blue in the gray. A lumber⁶ boat, with two very tall masts, was emerging gaunt and black out of the fog. When the tea came Thea ate hungrily, and Fred watched her. He thought her eyes became a little less bleak⁷. The kettle sang cheerfully over the spirit lamp, and she seemed to concentrate her attention upon that pleasant sound. She kept looking toward it listlessly and indulgently, in a way that gave him a realization⁸ of her loneliness. Fred lit a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully. He and Thea were alone in the quiet, dusky room full of white tables. In those days Chicago people never stopped for tea. “Come,” he said at last, “what would you do this summer, if you could do whatever you wished?”
 
“I’d go a long way from here! West, I think. Maybe I could get some of my spring back. All this cold, cloudy weather,”—she looked out at the lake and shivered,—“I don’t know, it does things to me,” she ended abruptly⁹.
 
Fred nodded. “I know. You’ve been going down ever since you had tonsilitis. I’ve seen it. What you need is to sit in the sun and bake for three months. You’ve got the right idea. I remember once when we were having dinner somewhere you kept asking me about the Cliff-Dweller ruins. Do they still interest you?”
 
“Of course they do. I’ve always wanted to go down there—long before I ever got in for this.”
 
“I don’t think I told you, but my father owns a whole canyon¹⁰ full of Cliff-Dweller ruins. He has a big worthless ranch¹¹ down in Arizona, near a Navajo reservation, and there’s a canyon on the place they call Panther Canyon, chock full of that sort of thing. I often go down there to hunt. Henry Biltmer ............