"Amusing, but not dignified and not to my taste. No! I shall celebrate by a terrific spree—a ride to the pass!"
He turned his face toward the range, earnest in its transfixion and suffused with the spirit of restlessness and the call of the mighty rock masses, gray in their great ribs and purple in their abysses. She felt that same call as something fluid and electric running through the air from sky to earth, and set her lips in readiness for whatever folly he was about to suggest.
"A ride to the pass and a view of the sunset from the very top!" he cried. He looked down at her quickly, and all the force of the call he had transformed into a sunny, personal appeal, which made her avert her glance. "My day in the country—my holiday, if you will go with me! Will you, and gaze out over that spot of green in the glare of the desert, knowing that a little of it is mine?"
"Your orange-trees are too young. It's so far away they will hardly show," she ventured, surveying the distance to the pass judicially.
"Will you?"
"Why, to me a ride to the pass is not a thing to be planned a day beforehand," she said deliberately, still studiously observing Galeria. "It is a matter of momentary inspiration. Make it a set engagement and it is but a plodding journey. I can best tell in the morning," she concluded. "And, by the way, I see you haven't yet tried grafting plums on the alfalfa stalks."
"No. I have learned better. It is not consistent. You see, you mow alfalfa and you pick plums."
This return to drollery, in keeping with the prescribed order of their relations, made her look up in candid amusement over the barrier which for a moment he had been endangering.
"Honestly, Jack, you do improve," she said, with mock encouragement. "You seem to have mastered a number of the simple truths of age-old agricultural experience."
"But will you? Will you ride to the pass?"