"If I were you, I'd LIVE here. Every day I would have the knowledge that I was coming home to THIS in the evening…. You could. Why don't you, I wonder?"
"I don't know. I can't remember a Foote who has ever lived in such a place. If it hasn't been done in my family, of course I couldn't do it."
She pressed her lips together at the bitter note in his voice. It was out of tune. "Have the ancestors been after you?" she asked. She often spoke of the ancestors lightly and jokingly, which she saw he rather liked.
"The whole lot have been riding me hard. And I'm a well-trained nag. I never buck or balk…. I never did till to-day."
"To-day?"
"I bucked them off in a heap," he said, with no trace of humor. He was dead serious. "I didn't know I could do it, but all of a sudden I was plunging and rearing—and snorting, I expect…. And they were off."
"To stay?"
He dropped his eyes and fell silent. "Anyhow," he said, presently, "it's a relief to be running free even for an hour."
"When they go to climb back why don't you buck some more? Now that they're off—keep them off."
"It's not so easy. You see, I've been trained all my life to carry them. You can't break off a thing like that in an instant. A priest doesn't turn atheist in a night… and this Family Tradition business is like a religion. It gets into your bones. You RESPECT it. You feel it demanding things of you and you can't refuse…. I suppose there is a duty."