"I should think you would have preferred the cabin above the dam," Isabelle suggested, recalling her own romantic notion of Dog Mountain. Mrs. Falkner made a little grimace.
"That might do for two or three months. But snowed in all the winter, even with the man you like best in all the world? He'd kill you or escape through the drifts … You see we hadn't a thing, not a cent, except his salary and that ended with the dam. It was only eighty a month anyway. This is better, a hundred and fifty," she explained with childish frankness. "But Rob has to work harder and likes the mountains, is always talking of going back. But I say there are better things than hiding yourself at the land's end. There's St. Louis, or maybe New York!"
Isabelle wondered how the Falkners were able to support such a hospitable house—they had two small children and Bessie had confided that another was coming in the spring—on the engineer's salary.
"And the other one," Mrs. Falkner added in revery, "is more than a millionnaire now."
Her face was full of speculation over what might have been as the wife of all that money.
"But we are happy, Rob and I,—except for the bills! Don't you hate bills?"
Isabelle's only answer was a hearty laugh. She found this pretty, frank little "Westerner" very attractive.
"It was bills that made my mother unhappy—broke her heart. Sometimes we had money,—most generally not. Such horrid fusses when there wasn't any. But what is one to do? You've got to go on living somehow. Rob says we can't afford this house,—Rob is always afraid we won't get through. But we do somehow. I tell him that the good time is coming,—we must just anticipate it, draw a little on the future."
At this point the men came through the window to the piazza. Bessie shook her box of candy coquettishly at Lane, who took the chair beside her. Evidently he thought her amusing, as most men did. Falkner leaned against the white pillar and stared up at the heavens. Isabelle, accustomed to men of more conventional social qualities, had found the young engineer glum and odd. He had a stern, rather handsome face, a deep furrow dividing his forehead and meeting the part of his thick brown hair, which curled slightly at the ends. "If he didn't look so cross, he would be quite handsome," thought Isabelle, wondering how long it might be before her host would speak to her. She could see him as he rode up to the hotel piazza that day, when Bessie Falkner had made up her mind on the moment that she could not marry "the other man." Finally Falkner broke his glum silence.
"Do you eat candy, Mrs. Lane? Pounds of it, I mean,—so that it is your staple article of diet."