"Because they look so little like me?"
"You forget I saw her once, in Chicago."
"I remember. You know, I think I went there that time because I heard you were playing there." He was silent a moment, pitching bits of sod into the river. "There is something that manages these things. If I had met you then we couldn't have been like this. And we might never have met again."
When he said "like this," he had touched my knee with his hand with that possessive intimacy with which a man may touch his own woman. I had to go back to the photographs of the children to save myself from the blinding lightning of his eyes.
"Are they like their mother?"
"I suppose so. I hope so—she was a good woman."
"I'm sure of that." He sat up with intention.
"Ah, it isn't just a sense of what is due her that makes me say that. She was thoroughly good. When I met her out in Idaho she was my chief's daughter and the only nice girl in the place. She wasn't what you are—no other woman is—but she was one of those plain, quiet women that have a kind of a grip on rightness. There was nothing could make her let go."
"My mother was like that. I think I can understand."
"Well, it was mighty good for me. I'm a bad lot, I suppose. I always want things harder than most, and I think the wanting justifies me in getting them, but she taught me better. She did things to me that made me fit for you, and I don't want us to forget that."