“Then,” declared Sproatly, “they don’t know very much. They’re the kind of men who’d spend an hour every morning putting their clothes on, and they haven’t found out that there’s no comfort in any garment until you’ve had to sew two or three flour bag patches on to it. Then think of the splendid freeness of the other way of living. You get your supper when you want it and just as you like it. No tea tastes as good as the kind with the wood smoke in it that you drink out of a blackened can. You can hear the little birch leaves and the grasses whispering about you when you lie down at night, and you drive on in the glorious freshness—just when it pleases you—every morning. Now the Company has the whole route and programme plotted out for me. Their clerks write me letters demanding most indelicately why I haven’t done this and that.”
Winifred looked at him disapprovingly. “Civilization,” she said, “implies responsibility. You can’t live just as you like without its being detrimental to the community.”
“Oh, yes,” returned Sproatly with a rueful gesture, “it implies no end of giving up. You have to fall into line, and that’s why I kept outside it just as long as I could. I don’t like standing in a rank, and,” he glanced down at his cloth, “I’ve an inborn objection to wearing uniform.”
Agatha laughed as she caught Hastings’ eye. She guessed that Sproatly would be sorry for his candor afterwards, but to some extent she understood what he was feeling. It was a revolt against cramping customs and conventionalities, and she partly sympathized with it, though she knew that such revolts are dangerous. Even in the West, those who cannot lead must march in column with the rank and file or bear the consequences of their futile mutiny. It is a hard truth that no man can live as he pleases.
“Restraint,” asserted Winifred, “is a wholesome thing, but it’s one most of the men I have met are singularly deficient in. That’s why they can’t be left alone, but must be driven, as they are, in companies. It’s their own fault if they now and then find it a little humiliating.”
There was a faint gleam in her eyes, at which Sproatly apparently took warning, for he said no more upon that subject, and they talked about other matters until he took his departure an hour or two later. It was the next afternoon when he appeared again and Mrs. Hastings smiled at Agatha as he and Winifred drove away together.
“Thirty miles is a long way to drive in the frost. I suppose you have noticed that she calls him Jim?” Mrs. Hastings commented. “Anyway, there’s a good deal of very genuine ability in that young man. He isn’t altogether wild.”
“His appearance rather suggested it when I first met him,” replied Agatha with a laugh. “Was it a pose?”
“No,” said Mrs. Hastings reflectively. “I think one could call it a reaction, and it’s probable that some very worthy people in the Old Country are to blame for it. Sproatly is not the only young man who has suffered from having too many rules and conventions crammed down his throat. In fact, they’re rather plentiful.”
Agatha said nothing further, for the little girls appeared just then, and it was not until the next afternoon that she and Mrs. Hastings were again alone together. Then as they drove across the prairie the older woman spoke of the business they had in hand.