“You’d run sheep till you was bent and gray, and the rheumatiz’ got set in your j’ints, me gerrel, before you’d win to the half of half a million. Here it comes to you while you’re young, with the keenness to relish it and the free hand to spend the interest off of it, and sail over the seas and see the world you’re longin’ to know and understand.”
Joan’s hat hung on the saddle-horn, the morning wind was trifling with light breath in her soft, wave-rippled hair. Her brilliant necktie had been put aside for one of narrower span and more sober hue, a blue with white dots. The free ends of it blew round to her shoulder, where they lay a moment before fluttering off to brush her cheek, as if to draw by this slight friction some of the color back into it that this troubled interview had drained away.
She stood with her head high, her chin lifted, determination 224 in her eyes. Thorned shrubs and stones had left their marks on her strong boots, the little teeth of the range had frayed the hem of her short cloth skirt, but she was as fresh to see as a morning-glory in the sun. Defiance outweighed the old cast of melancholy that clouded her eyes; her lips were fixed in an expression which was denial in itself as she stood looking into the wind, her little brown hands clenched at her sides.
“I want that you should marry him, as I have arranged it with old Malcolm,” said Tim, speaking slowly to give it greater weight. “I have passed my word; let that be the end.”
“I’ve got a right to have a word, too. Nobody else is as much concerned in it as me, Dad. You can’t put a girl up and sell her like a sheep.”
“It’s no sale; it’s yourself that comes into the handlin’ of the money.”
Tim took her up quickly on it, a gleam in his calculative eye, as if he saw a convincing way opening ahead of him.
“I couldn’t do it, Dad, as far as I’d go to please you; I couldn’t––never in this world! There’s something about him––something–––”
“It’ll wear off; ’tis the strangeness of him, but three years will bring him closer; it will wear away.”
“It’ll never wear away, because he isn’t––he isn’t clean!”