He spoke roughly. She lifted the sock she was darning and set it on the table.
"You'll take me this time, won't you, Jim?"
"Haven't you enough here to keep you busy?" He would not meet her eyes. "A fellow don't want a woman tagging after him every time he goes to town."
"He doesn't have her," she replied with quiet dignity.
She might have told him that one of the troubles was that she had too much to do about the H-Lazy Z. Most of her married life had been a drudgery, girls refusing to drown themselves in the isolation of the Red Deer—sixty miles from town, without a living soul between, and the nearest ranch ten miles to the east. Westward was nothing but wilds for further than anyone had travelled.
A tear squeezed into her eyes. He saw her struggling to hold it back, and hastily retreated outside.
The H-Lazy Z ranch may not have been quite equal to its reputation in a district where not a dozen citizens had ever visited it, but it could boast of luxuries—especially its ranch-house—that few other ranches considered worth the trouble and expense. This ranch-house was a two-story structure of numerous and ample rooms, erected by one with money to spare and English ideas of expenditure.
When Cockney Aikens selected his wife in a mid-Western American town on one of the many unreasonable and indefinite trips he made in those days to distant parts, he insisted on leaving her at her own home until he had built for her a residence his uncertain conscience told him was fit for a woman.
In those days Mary Aikens wanted her Jim more than any house but Cockney was obdurate, with a stubbornness that hurt her lovesick heart early in their married life. He had won her rapidly, with his big, joyous, reckless ways, and his pictures of the life in the Canadian West. With four years to look back on since she left the Eastern seminary, her little body crammed with romance, his pictures were all the more alluring from the monotonous similarity and repetition of the letters of her late schoolmates, each of whom, according to her own story, had captured the one and only sample of real American manhood.
When a girl's friends write month after month of home magnificence that radiates largely round the conventional "carriage and pair" that is the dream of schoolgirls, a whole ranch of horses and cattle looks like the earmarks of a fairy prince, especially when they belong to such a stunning big chap as Jim Aikens.