"The prairie is very beautiful to-night, and surely this grain promises a splendid yield," she said. "I am glad that it is so, for it will leave a pleasant memory. I shall probably never stand beside the wheat again."
This, I knew, was true. Beatrice Haldane would leave for Montreal and Paris in a day or two, and, paying Bonaventure a farewell visit, she had ridden over with her father, who had business with me. Strange to say, I could now contemplate her approaching marriage with equanimity.
"There are many drawbacks, but it is a good country," I answered thoughtfully.
Beatrice Haldane looked at me, and again I felt that she could still draw my soul to the surface for inspection if she desired to. I also fancied she knew her power, and wished to exercise it, but not from pride in its possession.
"And yet you can now hardly hope for more than a laborious life and moderate prosperity. The prairie is often dreary, and the toil almost brutalizing. Are you still content?"
The sympathy in the voice robbed the words of any sting, and I answered cheerfully: "It is all that you say; but there are compensations, and I think no effort is thrown away. I can only repeat the old argument. One can feel that he is playing a useful part in a comprehensive scheme even in the muddiest tramp down a half-thawn furrow, and that every ear of wheat called up or added head of cattle is needed by the world. Perhaps the chief care of three-fourths of humanity concerns their daily bread. Of course, our principal motive is the desire to attain our own, and you may not understand that there is a satisfaction in the mere discovering of how much one can do without, and, possibly as a result of this, that one's physical nature rises equal to the strain."
"And what do you gain—the right to work still harder?" she asked. "I can grasp the half-formed ideal in your mind, and it is old, for thousands of years before Thoreau men enlarged on it. Still, it has always seemed to me that the realization is only possible to the very few, and to the rest the result mostly destructive to the intellect."
I laughed a little. "And I am very much of the rank and file; but at least I have no hope of emulating either the medieval devotees or the modern Hindoo visionaries. We practice self-denial from the prosaic lack of money, or to save a little to sink in a longer furrow, and endure fatigue more often to pay our debts than to acquire a bank balance. Yet the result is not affected. The world is better fed."
"Yes," she said thoughtfully. "It seems that whatever your motives may be these things possess virtue in themselves—but the virtues do not necessarily react upon those who practice them."
"That is true," I answered. "Perhaps it is the motives that count."