Her inborn uneasiness at rooms, confining circumstance, her restless desire for unlimited horizons, for the mere fact of reaching, moving, stirred into being at the names he repeated. Tomorrow she would go away, find something new—
“It must have been horridly rough and dirty.”
“A good many turned back or died,” he agreed tentatively. “But after you once got there a sort of craziness came over you—you couldn't wait to buy a pan or shovel. The bay was full of rotting ships deserted by their crews, a thicket of masts with even the sails still hanging to them. The men jumped overboard to get ashore and pick up gold.”
She thought with a pang of the idle ships with sprung rigging, sodden canvas lumpily left on the decks, rotting as he had said, in files. The image afflicted her like a physical pain, and she left it hurriedly. “But San Francisco must have been full of life.”
“You had to shout to be heard over the bands, and everything blazing. Pyramids of nuggets on the gambling tables. Gold dust and champagne and mud.”
“Whatever will you find here?” She immediately regretted her query, which seemed to search improperly into the failure of his marriage.
“I'm thinking of going back,” he admitted.
Curiously Honora was sorry to hear this; unreasonably it gave to Cottarsport a new aspect of barrenness, the vista of her own life reached interminable and monotonous into the future. And she was certain that, without the necessity and incentive of labor, it would be destructive for Jason to return to San Francisco.
“What would you do?”
“Gamble,” he replied cynically.