"Oh, I wouldn't go for anything," she answered eagerly. "You've looked forward to it so long—well, not exactly that, for you didn't know she was coming. But it means a good deal to you. And I don't care a mite. I truly don't, not a mite."
Jerry flicked at the horse's ears and spoke out of his maze of dreamy anticipation.
"Seems if I should know her the minute I put eyes on her."
"Well, I guess you will," she encouraged him. "Maybe she's the only boarder they've got, so far."
"No, no, I don't mean that. Seems if I knew exactly how she ought to look."
"How d' you think, Jerry?" she inquired confidentially, as if his fancies were valuable and delightful to her. That was the tone she always had for him. Jerry would have said, if he had needed to think anything about it, that Marietta was the easiest person to talk to in the whole world. But he never did think about it. She was a part of his interchange with life, as real and as inevitable as his own hungers and satisfactions.
"Well," he said, while the horse slackened into a walk, with the grade of Blossom Hill, "I guess she's light-complexioned. Don't you?"
"Maybe," nodded Marietta kindly. "You can't tell."
"I guess she don't weigh very heavy," said Jerry, in a shamefaced bluntness, as if he wronged the absent goddess through such crudities. "You can't seem to see anybody that's had the thoughts she has and the way she's got of putting 'em—you can't see 'em very big-framed or heavy, can you? I can't, anyways."
"No," said Marietta, looking down at her own plump hands folded on her knee—"no, I don't know 's you can. Only see, Jerry! I always thought this little rise was about the prettiest view there is betwixt us and the Rocky Mountains."