The moonlight was sifting through the loose strands of her gleaming hair as she sat there bareheaded at his side, and the strength of his life reached out to her, and the deep yearning of his lonely soul. He knew that he wanted that woman out of all the world full of women whom he had seen and known–and passed. He knew that he wanted her with such strong need that from that day none other could come across the mirror of his heart and dim her image out of it.
Simply money would not win a woman like her; no slope-headed son of a ham factory could come along and carry her off without any recommendation but his cash. She had lived through that kind of lure, and she was there on his own level because she wanted to work out her clean life in her own clean way. The thought warmed him. Here was a girl, he reflected, with a piece of steel in her backbone; a girl that would take the world’s lashings like a white elm in a storm, 41 to spring resiliently back to stately poise after the turmoil had passed. Trouble would not break her; sorrow would only make her fineness finer. There was a girl to stand up beside a man!
He had not thought of it before–perhaps he had been too melancholy and bitter over his failure to take by storm the community where he had tried to make his start–but he believed that he realized that moment what he had needed all along. If, amid the contempt and indifference of the successful, he’d had some incentive besides his own ambition to struggle for all this time, some splendid, strong-handed woman to stand up in his gloom like the Goddess of Liberty offering an ultimate reward to the poor devils who have won their way to her feet across the bitter seas from hopeless lands, he might have stuck to it back there and won in the end.
“That’s what I’ve needed,” said he aloud, rising abruptly.
She looked up at him quickly.
“I’ve needed somebody’s sympathy, somebody’s sarcasm, somebody’s soft hand–which could be correctional on occasion–and somebody’s heart-interest all along,” he declared, standing before her dramatically and flinging out his hands in the strong feeling of his declaration. “I’ve been lonely; I’ve been morose. I’ve needed a woman like you!”
Without sign of perturbation or offense, Agnes rose and laid her hand gently upon his arm. 42
“I think, Dr. Slavens,” she suggested, “we’d better be going back to camp.”
They walked the mile back to camp with few words between them. The blatant noises of Comanche grew as they drew nearer.
The dance was still in progress; the others had not returned to camp.