"Till I can demonstrate my theory that, properly led, these people can be made happy."
"I am afraid you will live here until you are old," she said, and there was a note of undefinable regret in her voice. "I begin to feel that you really have a problem to solve."
"It lies with us, the dominant race," he said, slowly, "whether the red race shall die or become a strand in the woof of our national life. It is a question of saving our own souls, not of making them grotesque caricatures of American farmers. I am not of those who believe in teaching creeds that are dying out of our own life; to be clean, to be peaceful, to be happy—these are the precepts I would teach them."
"I don't understand you, and I think I would better go to bed," she said, with a return to her ordinary manner. "Good-night."
"Good-night," he replied, and in the utterance of those words was something that stirred her unaccountably.
"He makes life too serious, and too full of responsibility," she thought. "I don't like to feel responsible. All the same, he is fine," she added, in conclusion.
XV
ELSIE ENTERS HER STUDIO
Elsie, being young and of flamelike vitality, was up and ready for a walk while Two Horns was building the fire, and was trying to make him understand her wish to paint him, when Curtis emerged from his tent.