Mrs. Radcliffe was interested, and fancied that she partly understood his attitude.
“Your life is necessarily different from ours,” she suggested.
Wyllard smiled. “It’s so different that you couldn’t realize it. It’s all strain and effort from early sunrise until after dusk at night. Bodily strain of aching muscles, and mental stress in adverse seasons. We scarcely think of comfort, and never dream of artistic luxury. The money we make is sunk again in seed and extra teams and plows.”
“After all, a good many people are driven rather hard by the love of money here.”
“No,” Wyllard rejoined gravely, “that’s not it exactly. At least, not with the most of us. It’s rather the pride of wresting another quarter-section from the prairie, taking—our own—by labor, breaking the wilderness. You”—and he added this as if to explain that he could hardly expect her quite to grasp his views—“have never been out West?”
His hostess laughed. “I have stayed down in the plains through the hot season in stifling cantonments, and have once or twice been in Indian cholera camps. Besides, I have seen my husband sitting, haggard and worn with fever, in his saddle holding back a clamorous crowd that surged about him half-mad with religious fury. There were Hindus and Moslems to be kept from flying at each other’s throats, and at a tactless word or sign of wavering, either party would have pulled him down.”
“You’ll have to forgive me”—Wyllard’s gesture was deprecatory, though his eyes twinkled. “The notion that we’re the only ones who really work, or, at least, do anything worth while, is rather a favorite one out West. No doubt it’s a delusion. I should have known that all of us are born like that.”
Mrs. Radcliffe forgave him readily, if only for the “all of us,” which struck her as especially fortunate. A few minutes later there were voices in the hall, and then the door opened, and the girl whom he had met at the stepping stones came in. She was dressed in trailing garments which became her wonderfully, and he noticed now the shapely delicacy of her hands and the fine, ivory pallor of her skin. Mrs. Radcliffe turned to him.
“I had better present you formally to Miss Ismay,” she said. “Agatha, this is Mr. Wyllard, who I understand has brought you a message from Canada.”
There was no doubt that Wyllard was blankly astonished, and for a moment the girl was clearly startled, too.