"When they're doing things to you and you have to beat them to live."
"You speak as though you often had to do that."
She was looking away again; and he persisted, "Have you?"
"Well, once anyway," she admitted.
"Where?" Dave persisted.
She stared off as though she hadn't heard. "What birds are those? Gulls?"
"Yes," said Dave and again demanded: "Where was that?"
"Oh—out west."
"At Stanford?"
"No. Please don't ask me!" she begged, frankly.
Dave started with shame. "I don't know what's got into me," he apologized. "I never was so rude as that in all my life."
She said nothing but she did something better to make him feel forgiven. They had come to an ice grotto where the waves of the early winter had half completed one of the miniature mountains; they had built up half a hollow hill and then subsided, and merely had floored the half they had created. It left a wide, domed cavern with the solid side to the shore, the opening to the sun; and there was a flat ice shelf like a bench within it.
Fidelia went in and sat down and with her gloved hand, patted the seat beside her. "Isn't this wonderful!" she said. "We might be on the north coast of Iceland or in this cave fifty thousand years ago!"
"Yes," said Dave. "There's no change in ice and water and the sun!"
