“Not a bit! The foundation on which true friendship rests is that one of the parties enjoys to beat, and the other rather enjoys being beaten.”
“Walter has turned philosopher and poet and says clever things that you needn’t believe at all.”
“Oh, but I do believe him,” said Louise quickly, alarmed at the extent to which she did. To cover it she held out her hands with an exuberant cordiality and drew them into the house.
The luncheon table was drawn near windows framed by yellow curtains which Louise had herself hemmed. Through them, beyond the young green plants in the window-boxes, beyond the broken trees that Keble called the Castor and Pollux group, from their resemblance to the pillars in the Roman Forum, the two mountains that bounded the end of the lake could be seen coming together in an enormous jagged V, one overlapping the other in a thickly wooded canyon.
“And to think that all this marvel belongs to you, to do with as you see fit!” exclaimed Windrom. “It’s as though God had let you put the finishing touches on a monument He left in the rough.”
“We’re full of godlike projects,” said Keble. “This afternoon I’ll find a mount for you and take you over the place.”
“Let it be a gentle one,” Windrom pleaded. “Horses scare me,—to say nothing of making me sore.”
“Sundown won’t,” Louise quickly reassured him, then turned to her husband. “Let him ride Sundown, Keble . . . He’s mine,” she explained. “The only thing left in the rough by God that I’ve had the honor of improving, apart from myself! Like lightning if you’re in a hurry, but wonderfully sympathetic. I’ll give you some lumps of sugar. For sugar he’ll do anything. He’s the only horse in Alberta that knows the taste of it. But don’t let Keble see you pamper him, for he’s getting to be very Canadian and very Western and calls it dudish and demoralizing and scolds you for it.”
She paused, a little abashed by the length to which her harmless desire to help along the talk had taken her, and smiled half apologetically, half trustfully as her husband resumed inquiries about the incredible number of unheard-of people they knew in common: people who thought nothing of wandering from London to Cairo, from New York to Peking: rich, charming, clever, initiated people,—people who would always know what to do and say, she was sure of it.