Sam was awestruck. "Strike me pink!" he blurted out.
"How many d'you want?" asked the clerk.
Sam made a laborious mental calculation. "Give us four on 'em," he said. "An' 'ave yer got any black undershirts?"
"No," replied the clerk regretfully.
Sam was really grieved. He paid for his shirts and departed. The thoughts of wash-day hovered over the Barr Colonists, particularly the bachelors, like concentrated nightmares. Pioneering meant more than merely doing without tablecloths, and morning newspapers, and music, apparently. Keeping clean was a problem, too—one little problem among many much bigger ones.
Bert revolved happily round Esther Trailey, with whom he was now on speaking terms. He had mixed rather successfully with numbers of attractive girls in England, had even loved a few of them with a sort of deathless, polygamous, puppy-like fervour, but there was something infinitively more fascinating about having one's favourite girl in camp with one, in a far-off land, to protect from unknown dangers.
It is doubtful whether at home in England Bert would have come within Esther's orbit. He, as a blossoming lawyer, and she, as merely an insurance-man's daughter, would almost certainly have been separated by two distinct divisions of caste, perhaps by more. But Bert was already succumbing to the democratic Canadian spirit which despises snobbishness. He was now in a country where Mrs. Tom, and Mrs. Dick, and Mrs. Harry are all equal; and where social distinctions are almost unknown; and where janitors' wives, and the wives and daughters of farmers, and policemen, and small shopkeepers are welcomed in the luxurious drawing-rooms of high government and municipal officials, bankers, brokers, and others of the highly-educated classes.
In any event, Esther's beauty would have bridged the social gulf pretty efficiently. She was a glorious blonde, and built as symmetrically as the Medici Venus, only not quite so robustly. She was easily the loveliest girl among the colonists. All the men under sixty were unanimous about it. Even some of the women had been heard to remark that "she certainly would be rather nice if she didn't spoil herself by being so forward."
Bert thought her anything but forward. She was as tantalizing as a mirage to him. Actually, Esther was almost as bold as a swan, and pretty nearly as brazen as a flower. An exceedingly dutiful daughter, she adored her mother, against whose somewhat nagging disposition she hardly ever openly rebelled.
"Really," she used to think when she was alone sometimes; "I don't wonder at mamma being so irritable, when she sees how fearfully helpless dad is. Fancy him sacrificing all the comfort of our dear little home in England to drag us out here to live on a ranch—or whatever it is they call it! Why, he... Poor old dad!" and she would smile to herself as she recollected how pitifully pathetic he had looked when one of the horses one morning had stood on his foot, the one with the corn on it. "Ranching!" she often mused contemptuously. "Dad should have rented one of the allotment-gardens on the Headingley Road and tried his hand at that first."