“Yes. In its own way. Not because I married a girl who was part Eskimo. She couldn’t adjust to my way of life, I couldn’t adjust to hers. We were too far apart in training, in what we call morals, and perspective and habit and customs. Marriage is a terrific adjustment, at best. People say, oh, I wouldn’t marry a Negro, I wouldn’t marry an Indian, I wouldn’t marry a Chinese, I wouldn’t marry a Protestant, a Jew, a Catholic, a Mohammedan. It isn’t a matter of exterior difference, really, I suppose. Different color, yes. Different religions. But the real difference lies in thousands of years of habit, manners, customs, characteristics, food, standards, morals. All different. Not necessarily better or worse, but different. Perhaps those differences will cease to exist in this world of easy communication. I am selfish enough to hope not—in my lifetime. I love the differences. I’d hate to see a world in which the people were all alike, like the small towns all over the United States now, all the same neon lights, the same movies at the same movie houses, the same gas station, lunchroom, drugstore, supermarket, big glass schoolhouse. All standard and modern and convenient and deadly dull with sameness.”

Bridie began to unwind her mummy wrappings as if suddenly emerging into a warmer climate, though as they approached the Arctic the temperature of the plane became colder by the minute. “I’ll tell you this, Thor Storm. It’s getting so a person asks you a simple question, like do you think it’s going to rain, and they get a lecture on Alaska. I start out about Chris and this boy, and I end up listening to scientific laboratories. All right. Where were we at? Oh, yes. Chris has seen more of Alaska than any woman of seventy in the Territory. Then what?”

“Then she’s on her own.”

“Sometimes I think Czar was right all the time, after all.”

“Chris probably will be the only one who’ll know that, in the end. I don’t know. You don’t know, nor Czar. She’s different, we all know that. Twenty years from now she may be the most important woman in Alaska. Or she may be just another wife and mother somewhere else. That’s life enough, if that’s what she wants. How do we know that Barrow won’t be the most important spot on the Western Hemisphere next week or next year! Or just an ice-locked Arctic wilderness. Chris has seen the land she was born in. Czar will help her to see the world Outside. But her own life—that’s something she’ll have to decide for herself.”

Shrewdly Bridie carved it all down to the size she could grasp. Cosmic generalities were not for her. “If I had my way she wouldn’t be sitting up there in front with Ross this minute, let alone deciding her own life. Anyway, a pilot’s got no right to be talking to a girl when he’s flying real risky terrain like this. I’m as used to flying as anybody, but I know Chris. I bet she’s running this contraption this very minute.”