She was yet in the bud, far from the tempering touch of
experience, still in the state of looking forward and anticipating
things. She was dark, of medium height, and inclined to be plump.
Many delightful curves went to her making, and her waist tapered
elegantly, as was the fashion of the time. Thinking it over
afterwards, the young man decided that she did not belong in the
picture with a prairie schooner and camp kettles, because she looked so
like an illustration in a book of beauty. And David knew something of
these matters, for had he not been twice to St. Louis and there seen
the glories of the earth and the kingdoms thereof?
But life in camp outside Independence had evidently blunted his
perceptions. The small waist, a round, bare throat rising from a
narrow band of lace, and a flat, yellow straw hat were the young
woman's only points of resemblance to the beauty-book heroines. She
was not in the least beautiful, only fresh and healthy, the flat straw
hat shading a girlish face, smooth and firmly modeled as a ripe fruit.
Her skin was a glossy brown, softened with a peach's bloom, warming
through deepening shades of rose to lips that were so deeply colored no
one noticed how firmly they could come together, how their curving,
crimson edges could shut tight, straighten out, and become a line of
forceful suggestions, of doggedness, maybe--who knows?--perhaps of
obstinacy.
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