"Bella's children are different. Bella's different. She doesn't know anything better, she doesn't care. To have them well fed and healthy is enough for her. We're not like that. Our child's going to have everything."
"You're content enough here by yourself and you're a different sort to Bella."
"For myself!" she gave a shrug. "I don't care any more than Bella does. But for my child—my son—I want everything. Want him a gentleman like his ancestors, French and American"—she gave his arm a propitiating squeeze for she knew he disliked this kind of talk—"want him to be educated like my father, and know everything, and have a profession."
"You're looking far ahead."
"Years and years ahead," and then with deprecating eyes and irrepressible laughter, "Now don't say I'm foolish, but sometimes I think of him getting married and the kind of girl I'll choose for him—not stupid like me, but one who's good and beautiful and knows all about literature and geography and science. The finest girl in the world, and I'll find her for him."
He didn't laugh, instead he looked sulkily thoughtful:
"And where will we get the money to do all this?"
"We'll make it. We have a good deal now. Daddy John told me the other day he thought we had nearly ten thousand dollars in dust beside what my father left. That will be plenty to begin on, and you can go into business down on the coast. They told Daddy John at the Fort there would be hundreds and thousands of people coming in next spring. They'll build towns, make Sacramento and San Francisco big places with lots going on. We can settle in whichever seems the most thriving and get back into the kind of life where we belong."
It was her old song, the swan song of his hopes. He felt a loneliness more bitter than he had ever before conceived of. In the jarring tumult of a growing city he saw himself marked in his own eyes, aloof in the street and the market place, a stranger by his own fireside. In his fear he swore that he would thwart her, keep her in the wild places, crush her maternal ambitions and force her to share his chosen life, the life of the outcast. He knew that it would mean conflict, the subduing of a woman nerved by a mother's passion. And as he worked in the ditches he thought about it, arranging the process by which he would gradually break her to his will, beat down her aspirations till she was reduced to the abject docility of a squaw. Then he would hold her forever under his hand and eye, broken as a dog to his word, content to wander with him on those lonely paths where he would tread out the measure of his days.
Toward the end of November the rains came. First in hesitant showers, then in steadier downpourings, finally, as December advanced, in torrential fury. Veils of water descended upon them, swept round their knoll till it stood marooned amid yellow eddies. The river rose boisterous, swirled into the pits, ate its way across the honey-combed reach of mud and fingered along the bottom of their hillock. They had never seen such rain. The pines bowed and wailed under its assault, and the slopes were musical with the voices of liberated streams. Moss and mud had to be pressed into the cabin's cracks, and when they sat by the fire in the evening their voices fell before the angry lashings on the roof and the groaning of the tormented forest.