“Because I don’t know whether I love you enough or not.”
“I’ll take the chance,” he told her. “I’ll make you love me.”
She shook her head. “If I was going to marry a man and face a life that I was sure was going to be worse than the one I was leaving, I’d know that I loved him; and I wouldn’t hesitate a minute; but if I marry you it might just be because what you have to offer me looks like heaven compared to the life I’ve been leading since Dad died. I think too much of you and my self-respect to take the chance of waking up to the fact some day that I don’t love you. That would be Hell for us both, Ad; and you don’t deserve it—you’re too white.”
“I tell you that I’m perfectly willing to take the chance, Chita.”
“Yes, but I won’t let you. Wait a while. If I really love you I’ll find it out somehow, and you’ll know it—if you don’t I’ll tell you—but I’m not sure now.”
“Is there someone else, Chita?”
“No!” she cried, and her vehemence startled him.
“I’ll wait, then, because I have to wait,” he said, “and in the meantime if there is any way in which I can help you, let me do it.”
“Well,” she said, laughing, “you might teach the cows how to drill. I can’t think of anything else around a cow outfit, right off-hand, that you could do. Sometimes it seems to me like they didn’t have any cows back where you came from.”
King laughed. “They used to. All the streets in Boston were laid out by cows, they say.”