She shook her head.
“No,” she said, and her lips twisted into something like wistfulness as she dropped unconsciously into vernacular. “There’s a lavish of things I don’t know. You’ve got to learn ’em all to me—I mean teach them to me.”
“Well,” he went on slowly, “steamers that pass through the fresh water, from salt to salt, automatically cleanse their plates. You’ve been fresh water to me, Glory.”
“Jack,” she declared with tempestuous anxiety, “you say I’ve changed you. I’ll try to change myself, too, all the ways I can—all the ways you want.”
“I don’t want you changed,” he objected. “If you were changed, it wouldn’t be you.”
“Maybe,” she persisted, “you’d like me better if I were taller or had black eyes.”
“I wonder now,” he teased with the whimsey of the moment, “what you would look like with black eyes? I can’t imagine it. Will you do that for me?”
“Come to our house to-night,” she irrelevantly commanded. “Won’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, “I’d come to-night if I had to swim the Hellespont.”
But when he had left her an hour later at the crossroads and started back, his eyes fell on the ugly shapes of the three rattlesnakes, over which he had forgotten to keep watch and which she had not even seen, and yesterday came back with the impact of undisguised realization. Yesterday and to-morrow stood out again 157 in their own solid proportions and to-day stood like a slender wisp of heart’s desire shouldered between uncompromising giants of fact.