To him it had
seemed ideal, and he told her that that was the way he should like to
live and some day would, with just such a servant as Daddy John, and a
few real friends, and a library of good books. His enthusiasm made her
dimly realize the gulf between them--the gulf between the idealist and
the materialist--that neither had yet recognized and that only she, of
the two, instinctively felt. The roughness of the journey irked David.
The toil of the days wore on his nerves. She could see that it pained
him to urge the tired animals forward, to lash them up the stream banks
and drive them past the springs. And only half understanding his
character--fine where she was obtuse, sensitive where she was
invulnerable, she felt the continued withdrawal from him, the
instinctive shrinking from the man who was not her mate.
She had silently acquiesced in the idea, entertained by all the train,
that she would marry him. The doctor had intimated to her that he
wished it and from her childhood her only real religion had been to
please her father. Yet half a dozen times she had stopped the proposal
on the lover's lips.
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