“You don’t trouble me in the least,” Bettina replied, feeling her shyness vanish. “Besides, I was just going back to my friends.”
Yet she did not go at once.
She was interested in the unusual appearance of her companion. He had folded his arms and was looking gravely back at the constantly receding landscape.
“And east is east and west is west,
And never the twain shall meet.”
He spoke apparently without regarding Bettina and softly under his breath.
Therefore it was Bettina who really began their conversation, their other speeches to each other having expressed only the ordinary conventionalities between fellow-travelers.
“It is curious—your repeating those lines,” Bettina returned, her eyes changing from gray to blue, as they often did in moments of friendliness. “I have just been standing here trying to recall another line of Kipling’s poetry. And it has come to me since you spoke: ‘The wind whimpers through the fields.’ Do you care for Kipling’s poetry?”
The young man turned more directly toward Bettina.
“I am an Indian,” he explained simply. “It is natural that I should think of those lines, for I have been for several years at a college in your eastern country and am now returning to my own people and my own land. I am a Hopi. My home is in the province of Tusayan, Arizona, in the town of Oraibi. We are Indians of the Pueblo.”