(Debating the proposition.)
Um—maybe I tell Mrs. Eppingwell.
FREDA
(Angrily.)
Don't be silly, Charley. You mustn't tell anybody. Promise me now.
SITKA CHARLEY
(With despairing perplexity.) All right, I no tell.
FREDA
Now this little girl is coming in over the ice—her name is Flossie. She has lived a soft life down in California, where the sun is warm and there is no snow. She does not know hardship, nor the trail, and she is having a hard time now on the trail. Think of it!—sixty-five degrees below zero this morning, and she is out in it, walking, walking, walking, her breath freezing, her mouth icing up, her eyebrows rimed with frost. And she is very stiff, and sore, and tired. Every step of the trail she takes in pain. It is like a bad dream to her, Charley. But she sees, always before her, at the end of the dream, an awakening at Dawson, in the arms of the man who is to marry her. But, Charley, what if when she gets to Dawson there is no Floyd Vanderlip? no man to marry her? It will break her heart. It will be no happy awakening from a bad dream, but the beginning of a worse dream. And she is a little girl, Charley—not a strong woman like me who does not care. She will care, and she will know nobody, and she will cry, and cry, and cry. Did you ever hear a woman cry, Charley? Think of it, she is only a little girl.