“Don’t know as I blame him,” said Carver. “The last few days I’ve developed a downright aversion to the sight of fence wire myself. Glad to see me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be out of here and established in a room of my own so that you can have your house by to-morrow, Don. I’ve been waiting for the present occupants to vacate.”
“You stay right on here,” he insisted. “I won’t be needing it.”
“Thanks, Don, but I can’t do that,” she said. “I have to stop floating and find some nook of my own. I can’t follow Bart around any longer. For three years now we’ve drifted from one spot to the next; sometimes in line camps; more frequently in some rooming house in any town where we happened to be, always knowing that wherever it was it wouldn’t be home for long. I didn’t mind at first, for I was trying to keep Bart away from Milt and Noll; but they always turn up again and he follows them off. I’d love even a sod house if only I could call it my own and know I wouldn’t have to move out on an hour’s notice. I’m sick of gypsying. I want to feel settled—feel that I’m attached!”
He reached over and rested a hand on her shoulder.
“I know, Honey,” he said. “So do I. That’s exactly my own frame of mind. The best way all round is for you and me to get attached and settle. Won’t you?”
She felt that he had failed to grasp the fact of what a sense of permanency would mean to her after the nomadic existence she had followed for the past few years.
“Listen, Molly,” he said, divining something of her thoughts. “It’s not the way a man says a thing but the way he means it that really counts. And I was meaning that a lot.”
“But you don’t even know to-day what you’re going to do to-morrow,” she said. “It would be only exchanging one state of gypsying for another. Don’t you see that?”
He did, at least, see that the moment was not right and he settled back into his chair and twisted a cigarette.