"For years and years has Jean Baptiste labored to get his fields as they are. For, in the beginning, they were wild, raw and unproductive, whereupon naught but coyotes, prairie dogs and wild Indians lived; where only a wild grass grew weakly and sickly from the surface and yielded only a prairie fire that in the autumn time burned all in its path; a land wherein no civilized one had resided since the beginning of time."
"Oh, Jean!"
"And he has longed for woman's love. For, according to the laws of the Christ, man should take unto himself a wife, else the world and all its people, its activity, its future will stop forthwith!"
"You are so wonderful!"
"Not wonderful, am I," quoth Baptiste. "Just a mite practical."
"But it is wonderful anyhow, all you say!"
"And yet my Orlean does not love me yet!"
"I didn't say that," she argued, thinking of what she had written him.
"Since therefore she has not said it, then methinks that she does not."
"I—I—oh, you—are awful!"