“Well, sit down again, please. I am surprised. I thought you would respect Ishbel.”
“Not I. She’ll spoil her looks, and then where’ll she be?”
Julia, in a moment of prescience, asked with a mixture of wistfulness and disdain, “Do you care so much for mere beauty?”
“Betcherlife. I hate ugliness, and I love pretty girls. We have them in San Francisco by wholesale. To be ugly is a crime out there. I intend to marry the prettiest I can find just as soon as I’m old enough.”
“And some day—when she loses her youth and beauty?”
“Oh, I’ll love her just the same, for she’ll be my wife, and I’ll be old myself then, and have nothing to say. But I’ll have had the pick. I intend to have the pick of everything going.”
“Going?”
“In life. I must teach you our slang. English slang has no sense.”
“I fancy I could understand you better if you did. But I’ve seen men whose wives were once young and pretty, and who are always after some beauty twenty years younger than themselves—thirty—forty —”
Then she blushed, feeling that such a display of worldly knowledge was a desecration in the presence of fifteen summers.