He took command now, and there were no more tender allusions. He sniffed the smell of the grass and the way-side trees, and remarked upon the cattle, and inquired the names of several birds whose notes reached across the field.
"Do you know, I'm no wild lover of the country, and I don't admire the country people unreservedly. There are exceptions, of course—but my experience with them has not been such as to make them heroic sufferers, as the new school of fiction sets 'em forth. They are squalid enough and poor enough, heaven knows, but it is the squalor of piracy—they do as well as I should under the same circumstances, no doubt."
Rose looked at him narrowly, as if to find his real thought. He stopped abruptly at her glance.
"I beg your pardon for boring you; but these disagreeable phases of my character should be known to you. I'm full of whims and notions, you'll find."
She looked away and a moment later said: "There is our farm; that house in the grove is ours."
"Cattle I hate, so I hope your father will not expect me to be interested in stock."
This was the first time he had mentioned her father, and it moved her unaccountably. It would be so dreadful if he should not understand her father. His perverse attitude toward her and toward the country had brought her from exalted singleness of emotion down to a complexity of questionings and forebodings.
As they whirled in the yard Mason saw a new house of the ambitious pork-pie order, standing in a fairly well-kept sward, with a background of barns, corncribs, pigsties and beehives. A well-to-do farmstead of the more fortunate sort, and the thought that the man coming out of the barn to meet them was to be his father-in-law struck him like a gust of barnyard air. Really could it be that he had made this decision?
As the man came nearer he appeared a strong-armed, gentle-faced farmer of sixty. His eyes were timid, almost appealing. His throat was brown and wrinkled as leather. His chin beard was a faded yellow-grey, and his hands were nobbed and crooked in the fingers. He peered at Mason through dimmed eyes.
"Father," said Rose, and her voice trembled a little, "this is Mr. Mason."