# The Sick-a-Bed Lady/The Pink Sash

​NO man could have asked the ques tion more simply. The whole gaunt, gigantic Rocky Mountain landscape seemed indeed most pe- culiarly conducive to simple emo' tions.
Yet Donas Guthrie s original remark had been purely whimsical and distinctly apropos of nothing at all. The careless knocking of his pipe against the piazza's primitive railing had certainly not pre pared the way for any particularly vital statement. "Up - - to - - the - - time - - he's - - thirty," drawled the pleasant, deep, distinctly masculine voice, "up to the time he's thirty, no man has done the things that he's really wanted to do but only the things that happened to come his way. He's forced into business to please his father, and cajoled into the Episcopal Church to gratify his mother, and bullied into red neckties to pacify his sister Isabel. But once having reached the grown up, level-headed, utterly independent age of thirty, a man's a fool, I tell you, who does n't sit down de​liberately, and roll up his sleeves, and square his jaw, and list out, one by one, the things that he wants in the presumable measure of lifetime that's left him and go ahead and get them!"
"Why, surely," said the young woman, without the slightest trace of surprise. Something in her matter-of-fact acquiescence made Donas Guthrie smile a trifle shrewdly.
"Oh ! So you've got your own list all made out? "he quizzed. Around the rather tired-looking corners of Esther Davidson's mouth the tiniest pos- sible flicker of amusement began to show.
"No, not all made out, "she answered frankly.
    You see, I wasn't thirty until yesterday."
Stooping with cheerful unconcern to blow a little fluff of tobacco ash from his own khaki-colored knees to hers, Guthrie eyed her delightedly from under his heavy brows.
"Oh, this is working out very neatly and pleas- antly," he mused, all agrin."Ever since you joined our camping party at Laramie, jumping off the train as white-faced and out of breath as though }you'd been running to catch up with us all the way from Boston indeed, ever since you first wrote me at Morristown, asking full particulars about the whole expedition and begging us to go to the Sierra Ne- vadas instead and blotted Sierra twice and crossed
"Is—a—pink—sash—exactly a—a—passion?"
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