"
"Well I'll begin a second education. When we get settled I'll teach
you to reason."
"Begin now." She folded her hands demurely in her lap and lifting her
head back laughed: "Here I am waiting to learn."
"No. We want more time. I'll wait till we're married."
Her laughter diminished to a smile that lay on her lips, looking stiff
and uncomfortable below the fixity of her eyes.
"That's such a long way off," she said faintly.
"Not so very long."
"Oh, California's hundreds of miles away yet. And then when we get
there we've got to find a place to settle, and till the land, and lay
out the garden and build a house, quite a nice house; I don't want to
live in a cabin. Father and I have just been talking about it. Why
it's months and months off yet."
He did not answer. She had spoken this way to him before, wafting the
subject away with evasive words. After a pause he said slowly: "Why
need we wait so long?"
"We must. I'm not going to begin my married life the way the emigrant
women do. I want to live decently and be comfortable."
He broke a sprig off a sage bush and began to pluck it apart.
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