"I didn't know you were coming back so soon," she said after a struggle.
"Well, Father got in such a fix I had to," he answered, with a slight frown which made his face, she thought, more attractive. The haunting pathos, which she detected but could not explain, looked out of his eyes; the pathos of heroic weakness confronting insurmountable obstacles. "Of course it isn't for ever," he said in a surprisingly cheerful voice. "Father had a second stroke a few weeks ago, and they sent for me because there was nobody to see that he was taken care of. But as soon as he gets better, or if he dies," his tone was kind but impersonal, "I'll go back again and take up my work. I had just got my degree, and was starting in for a year's experience in a big hospital. Until I came I thought it was for a few days. The doctor telegraphed that Father wouldn't last out the week; but he's picked up, and may go on for a while yet. I can't leave him until he is out of danger, and in the meantime I'm trying to enlighten the natives. God! what a country! Nobody seems to ask any more of life than to plod from one bad harvest to another. They don't know the first principles of farming, except of course Mr. Ellgood, who has made a success of Green Acres, and that clownish-looking chap who owns the store. I wonder what the first Pedlar's were like. The family must have been in the same spot for a hundred and fifty years."
"Oh, they've been there always. But most of the other farmers are tenants. Pa says that's why the land has gone bad. No man will work himself to death over somebody else's land."
"That's the curse of the tenant system. Even the negroes become thrifty when they own a piece of land. And I've noticed, by the way, that they are the best farmers about here. The negro who owns his ten or twelve acres is a better manager than the poor white with twice the number."
"I know," Dorinda assented; but she was not interested in a discussion of farming. All her life she had heard men talk of farming and of nothing else. Surely there were other things he could tell her! "I should think it would be dreary for you," she added, with a woman's antipathy to the impersonal.
Turning to her suddenly, he brushed the snow-flakes from the fur robe over her knees. His gestures, like his personality, were firm, energetic, and indescribably casual. Against the brooding loneliness of the country his figure, for all its youthful audacity, appeared trivial and fugitive. It was as if the landscape waited, plunged in melancholy, for the passing of a ray of sunshine. Though he had sprung from the soil, he had returned to it a stranger, and there could be no sympathetic communion between him and the solitude. Neither as a lover nor as a conqueror could he hope to possess it in spirit.
"If I thought it was for ever, I'd take to drink or worse," he replied carelessly. "One can stand anything for a few weeks or even months; but a lifetime of this would be—" He broke off and looked at her closely. "How have you stood it?" he asked. "How does any woman stand it without going out of her head?"
Dorinda smiled. "Oh, I'm used to it. I even like it. Hills would make me feel shut in."
"Haven't you ever wanted to get away?"
"I used to think of it all the time. When I first went to the store, I was listening so hard for the trains that I couldn't hear anything else."