This one, it suddenly appeared to Honora, had been thrust upon her. She made repeated and angry efforts to put Jason Burrage from her mind; but his appearance sitting before her, his words and patent discontent, flooded back again and again. She realized now that he was no impersonal problem; somehow he had got twisted into the fibres of her existence; he was more vividly in her thoughts than Paret Fifield had ever been. She attempted to ridicule him mentally, and called up pictures of his preposterous clothes, the ill-bred waistcoats and ponderous watch chain. They faded before the memory of the set jaw, his undeniable romance.
Wrapped in fur, she elected to drive after dinner; the day was cold but palely clear, and she felt that her cheeks were glowing with unusual color. Above the town, on the hills now sere with frost and rock, the horses, under the aged guidance of Coggs, continually dropped from a jog trot to an ambling walk. Honora paid no attention to the gait, she was impervious to the wide, glittering reach of water; and she was startled to find herself abreast a man gazing at her.
“I made a jackass out of myself last night,” he observed gloomily.
She automatically stopped the carriage and held back the buffalo robe. Jason hesitated, but was forced to take a seat at her side. Honora said nothing, and the horses again went forward.
“I'd been drinking a lot and was all on edge,” he volunteered further. “I feel different today. I can remember your mother driving like this. I was a boy then, and used to think she was made of ice; wondered why she didn't run away in the sun.”
“Mother was very kind, really,” Honora said absently. She was relaxed against the cushions, the country dipped and spread before her in a restful brown garb; she watched Coggs' glazed hat sway against the sky. The old sense of familiarity with Jason Burrage came back: why not, since she had known him all their lives? And now, after his years away, she was the only one in Cottarsport who at all comprehended his difficulties. He was not commonplace, a strong man was never that; and, in a way, he had the quality which more than any other had made her father so notable. And he was not unpleasant so close beside her. That was of overwhelming importance in the formation of her intimate opinion of him. He had been refined by the bitterness of his early failure in California; he bore himself with a certain dignity.
“What'll I do?” he demanded abruptly.
For the life or her she couldn't tell him. Except for platitudes she could offer no solution against the future. Actual living, directly viewed, was like that—hopeless of exterior solution. “I don't know,” she admitted, “I wish I did; I wish I could help you.”
“This money, what's it good for? I can't get my family to burn two small stoves at once; they'd die in the kitchen if they had a hundred parlors; I've bought more clothes than I'll ever wear, four high hats and so on. Not going to get married; no use for a big house, for anything more than the room I have. I get plenty to eat——”
“You might do some good with it,” she suggested. The base of what she was saying, Honora realized, was that he would be as well off with his fortune given away. Yet it was unjust, absurd, for him not to get some use, pleasure, from what he had worked so extravagantly to obtain.