“I—I think I could feel all that,” she said after awhile. “I—I think I could feel so a man could beat me to death if he wanted to. But—”
She broke off. Then her gaze came back to the brown eyes beside her, and a sort of ecstatic smile lit her eyes and transformed her with its radiance.
“But he’d have to be a great feller, with the courage of a fighter. He’d have to be a man who ordered other folks around, a man who knew no fear. A man who’d help a friend with his last dollar or kill the enemy who hurt him. Yes,” she went on dreamily, “and he’d have grey eyes, and a strong face that wasn’t maybe too good-looking, and dark hair, and shoulders like a bull caribou, and—”
“Be like to some feller you got a look at down in Placer?”
Hesther had returned to her work, and drew a deep breath of expectancy. But the girl ignored the challenge. She turned suddenly and spoke with feverish eagerness.
“You felt that way, Mum, for your Jim?” she demanded. “That’s the way all gals feel when they want—want to marry someone? Maybe the Eskimo squaws feel that way, too? Just every woman? Is that so?”
Hesther smiled and nodded.
“Sure. Tell me about him.”
The older woman’s philosophy had been swallowed up by the irresistible emotions of her sex. She wanted to hear the story of this child’s tender romance. She had made up her mind there was a romance deeply hidden within her innocent heart, and that it had taken place in that great gold city the girl had visited with Usak. She was hungering for the story of it as every real woman hungers for the love story of another, after having passed a similar milestone in her own life. She was thrilled, and her calm veins were afire with the recrudescence of her youth.
But the Kid suddenly came out of her dreaming, and smilingly shook her head in a fashion that flooded the other with disappointment.