“In one way it is, but I want you to understand,” he replied. “I might begin again in some desolate little town––but I aimed higher––and was once very nearly getting there. As it is, if I made my mark, the thing I did would be remembered against me. We’ll let it go. As a surgeon of any account I’m done for.”
“Still, it’s a tolerably big country, and folks forget. You might, at least, go so far, and that would, after all, give you a good deal––a competence, the right to marry.”
Gordon laughed, but his voice was harsh.
“This is one of the days on which I must talk. I feel like that, now and then,” he said. Then he looked at Nasmyth hard. “Well, I’ve seen the one woman I could marry, and it’s certain that, if I dare make her the offer, she would never marry me.”
“Ah,” said Nasmyth, “you seem quite sure of that?”
“Quite,” declared Gordon, and there was, for a moment or two, an almost uncomfortable silence in the shanty.
Then he made a little forceful gesture as he turned to his companion again.
“Well,” he said, “after all, what does it count for? Is it man’s one and only business to marry somebody? Of course, we have folks back East, who seem to act on that belief, and in your country half of them appear to spend their time and energies philandering.”
“I don’t think it’s half,” said Nasmyth dryly.
“It’s not a point of any importance, and we’ll let it go. Anyway, it seems perilously easy for a man who gets the woman he sets his mind upon to sink into a fireside hog in the civilized world. Now and then, when things go wrong with folks of that kind, they come out here, and nobody has any use for them. What can you do with the man who gets sick the first time he sleeps in the rain, and can’t do without his dinner? Oh, I 98 know all about the preservation of the species, but west of the Great Lakes we’ve no room for any species that isn’t tough and fit.”