Happy stood for a moment in the doorway against a lamplit background, and Boone acknowledged to himself that she had an undeniable beauty and that she carried herself with the simple grace of a slender poplar. She was, he told himself with unsparing self-accusation, in every way worthier than he, for she had fought her battles without aid, and now she stood there smiling on him confidently out of dark eyes that made no effort to render their welcome coy with provocative concealment.
"Howdy, Boone," she said in a voice of soft and musical cadences. "It's been a long time since I've seen you."
"Yes," he answered with a painful sort of slowness, "but now that we're both through school and back home to stay, I reckon we'll see each other oftener. Are you glad to come back, Happy?"
For a few moments the girl looked at him in the faint glow that came through the door, without response. It was as though her answer must depend on what she read in his face, and there was not light enough for its reading.
"I don't quite know, myself, Boone," she said hesitantly at last. "I've sort of been studying over it. How about you?"
When she had settled into a chair, he took a seat at her feet with his back against one of the posts of the porch, and replied with an assumption of certainty that he did not feel, "A feller's bound to be glad to get back to his own folks."
"After I'd been down there the first time and came back here again, I wasn't glad," was her candid rejoinder. "I felt like I just couldn't bear it. Over there things were all clean, and folks paid some attention to qualities—only they didn't call 'em that. They say 'manners' at the school. Here it seemed like I'd come home to a human pig-sty—and I was plumb ashamed of my own folks. When I looked ahead and saw a lifetime of that—it seemed to me that I'd rather kill myself than go on with it."
"You say"—Boone made the inquiry gravely—"that you felt like that at first. How do you feel now?"
"Later on I got to feelin' ashamed of myself, instead of my people," she replied. "I got to seein' that I was faultin' them for not having had the chance they were slavin' to give me."
Boone bent attentively forward but he said nothing, and she went on.