“Now hold on there, Romola. Let’s try to be just even if we are prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put ’em in your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He’s no farm-hand; he’s a cow-hand or was before he got this job of steering tourists around through these mountains—and that’s a very different thing, I take it. And what he knows he knows blame’ well. I wish I could mingle in with a horse the way he does. When he gets in a saddle he’s riveted there but I only come loose and work out of the socket. And I’d give about five years off my life to be able to handle a trout-rod like he can. I claim that in his departments he’s a fairly high-grade proposition. He’s aware of it, too, but I don’t so much blame him for that, either. If you don’t think well of yourself who else is going to?”
“Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you’re really—but no, you couldn’t be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at their different environments! Look at their different view-points!”
“I’m looking—just as hard as you are. You don’t get what I’m driving at. I wouldn’t fancy having this boy for a son-in-law any more than you would—although at that I’m not saying I couldn’t maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still, you needn’t mind worrying so much about their respective stations in life. I didn’t have any station in life to start from myself—it was a whistling-post. And yet I’ve managed to stagger along fairly well. I’d a heap rather see Shirley tied up to pretty near any decent, ambitious, self-respecting young cuss that came along than to have her fall for one of those plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep hanging round her back home. I know the breed. In my day they used to be guitar-pickers—and some of ’em played a snappy game of Kelly pool. Now they’re Charleston dancers and the only place most of ’em carry any weight is on the hip.
“But that’s not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for this party she’d probably be a mighty regretful young female when the bloom began to rub off the peach. They haven’t been raised to talk the same language—that’s the trouble. I don’t want her to make a mistake that’ll gum up her life before it’s fairly started; don’t want that happening any more than you do. I don’t want her to have a husband that she’s liable later on to be ashamed to show him off before the majority of her friends, or anyhow one that she’d maybe have to go around making excuses for the way he handled his knife and fork in company; or something. Right now, the fix she’s in, she’s probably saying to herself that she could be perfectly satisfied to settle down in a cabin somewhere out here and wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next forty or fifty years. But that’s only her heart talking, not her head. After a while she’d get to brooding on Palm Beach.
“But if she’s set her mind—and you know how stubborn she is when she gets her mind set—thank Heavens she didn’t get that from my side of the family!—I say, if she’s set her mind on him, Heavens above only knows what’s going to happen. She’s bewitched, she’s hypnotized; it’s this free-and-easy Western life that’s fascinated her. I can’t believe she’s in love with him!”
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe she’s in love with a two-gallon hat and a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides, or then again on the other hand maybe it’s the real thing with her, or a close imitation of it. That’s for us to find out if we can.”
“I won’t believe it. She’s distracted, she’s glamoured, she’s—”
“All right, then, let’s get her unglammed.”
“But how?”