“I reckon, mister, I’ll be hittin’ the hay,” she said, rising.
“Chita!” he cried. “Why do you do it?”
“Do what—go to bed?”
“No, not that. Listen to me, Chita. I may offend you—I certainly don’t want to, but I can’t sit here and look at you and then listen to you and not speak.”
“You got me chokin’ leather,” she admitted, “and I’m two jumps behind at that.”
“I suppose you know that you are a very beautiful girl,” he said. “Beside your beauty you have character, intelligence, a wonderful heart. But——” he hesitated. It was going to be hard to say and he was already regretting that he had started it.
“Well,” she said, “but what? I aint committed no murders.”
“I haven’t any right to say what I started to say to you, Chita; except that I—well, Chita, I think you’re the most wonderful girl I ever met and I want you to be right in every way.”
“I reckon I know what you mean,” she said. “We don’t talk alike. I know it. You aint a-goin’ to hurt my feelings, because I know you aint makin’ fun of me—and I wouldn’t even care if you did, if you’d help me.
“I was born on a farm in Kansas and what school they was was too fer off to go to only a few weeks in the fall and spring. I didn’t learn much of nothin’ there. Maw died when I was little. Dad learned me all he knew—how to read and write a little and figger. If I only had somethin’ decent to read, or educated folks to talk to me. I know I got it in me to be—to be different. If there was only some way.”