"But you," I ventured, "will always live with the Army?"
"Why, our home is in Virginia, too, over in old Albemarle, though we don't often see it. I have been West since I came out of school, pretty much all the time, and unless there should be a war I suppose I shall stay always out here with my father. My mother died when I was very young."
"And you will never come back to quiet old Virginia, where plodding farmers go on as their fathers did a hundred years ago?"
She made no immediate answer, and when she did, apparently mused on other things. "The Plains," she said, "how big—how endless they are! Is it not all wild and free?"
Always she came back to that same word "free." Always she spoke of wildness, of freedom.
"For all one could tell, there might be lions and tigers and camels and gazelles out there." She gestured vaguely toward the wide horizon. "It is the desert."
We rode on for a time, silent, and I began to hum to myself the rest of the words of an old song, then commonly heard:
"O come with me, and be my love,
For thee the jungle's depths I'll rove.
I'll chase the antelope over the plain,