"Rot!"
"Perhaps. It interested me, though, when I'd gotten over the first shock. He said another thing that interested me; he said that I was the first good white woman he'd ever seen smoke."
He laughed harshly.
"At least he did you the honor to think you good."
"Yes,"—still deliberately,—"and it was a novel sensation. It was the first time any man had ever appealed to the commonplace thing in me that we call womanhood. He wasn't preaching. It was a practical matter with him....
"I don't think you'd understand this man, Dick. He takes little things quite seriously and yet he appears to be laughing at the whole scheme all the time."
He put his glass down slowly.
"Do you mean that one of these roughnecks has been making love to you?"
"Oh, by no means. I don't think he even likes me and I want him to! Why, this morning he was going away, was not even going to work for me, and I had to beg him to stay.
"Dick, you don't understand! This man is so different from you, from me, from all of us. Rough, yes, but I don't think he'd try to buy a woman. And if he should I'm sure he'd be most frank about it; he wouldn't hide behind words."