She tired quickly in the first days that she rode and once, remarking on it, she drew this advice from Beck:
"You'd do a lot better without corsets."
Simply, bluntly, impersonally and with so much assurance that she could not even reply. His observation had smacked of no disagreeable intimacy. She had told him that she tired; he had given her his idea of the cause.
She took off her corsets.
A day of cold rain came on; at noon the downpour abated for a time and Jane asked Hepburn to ride down the creek with her to look over land that was to be cleared and irrigated.
"Have you got a slicker, ma'am?" Beck asked when she requested that a horse be saddled.
She had none.
"There ain't an extra one on the place," he said, "so I guess you'd better not go."
"But the rain is over. Anyhow, what hurt will a wetting do?"
"I don't guess the rain's all over," he said. "And to get wet and cold ain't a good thing for anybody; it'd be a mighty bad thing for you. You're a city woman; you can't do these things yet."