So that was the end of that, much to the girl’s relief, and Wichita resumed her talk with the officer; an experience which she enjoyed, for she was avid to learn, and she knew that the average man or woman of the frontier could teach her little along the lines toward which her ambition lay.
On several occasions she had met cultured men—men who had stopped at her father’s Kansas farm, or at the ranch since they came to Arizona—and she had been vividly conscious of a difference between them and the sort of people to whose society she was accustomed.
From them she had derived her first appreciation of the existence of a thing called conversation and a knowledge of its beauty and its value and its rarity. She had been quick to realize her own lack of conversational ability and ambitious enough to dream of improvement; but dreaming was about as far as she could go. What few books and magazines and newspapers filtered to her remote home she devoured eagerly and they taught her many things, though usually overdrawn. She learned new words, the meanings of which she usually guessed shrewdly enough, for she possessed no dictionary, but there was nothing or no one to teach her how to pronounce either the new words or the old, so that she was never actively aware that she mispronounced them and only vaguely disturbed when she listened to the conversation of a person like Lieutenant King. In truth, when she gave the matter any thought, she was more inclined to regret his weird pronunciation of such common words as “Injun” and “hoss” than to question her own. It was the things he spoke of and the pleasant intonation of his cultured voice that delighted her.
Lieutenant King was asking her about herself, which didn’t interest her at all, and how long she had lived in Arizona.
“Goin’ on five year,” she replied, “an’ I reckon you jes’ come out with that last bunch o’ shave-tails at the post, didn’t you?”
He flushed, for he had not realized how apparent were his youth and the newness of his uniform. “Yes,” he said, “I graduated in June and I only joined my regiment a few weeks ago.”
“From the States o’ course?” she asked.
“Yes, and you?”
“I’m from back East, too,” she told him.
“Good! From what part?”