"Oh, I just listened. If they can get the money, it might be successful. That country is growing fast…. It would be a chance for some young man to win his spurs,—hard work, though."
He talked on, explaining the strategic position of the new road, its relation to rivals, the prospects of that part of the country, the present condition of the money market in respect to new enterprises; for Isabelle seemed interested. But when she interrupted with sudden energy, "Do it, John! Why don't you take it?" he looked puzzled.
"It is a young man's job,—pioneer work."
"But you are young—we are young! And it would be something worth doing, pioneer work, building up a new country like that."
"There's not much money in it," he replied, smiling at her girlish enthusiasm, "and I am afraid not much fame."
Not money, not the fame of the gladiator, the fame of the money power; merely the good report of a labor competently performed, the reward of energy and capacity—and the thing done itself. But to Isabelle this pioneer quality of the work appealed strongly. Her imagination expanded under the idea.
"I can see you living for the next ten years in a small Texas town!" he jested. "However, I suppose you wouldn't live out there."
"But I should!" she protested. "And it is what I should like best of all, I think—the freedom, the open air, the new life!"
So from a merely casual suggestion that Lane had not thought worth serious consideration, there began to grow between them a new conception of their future. And the change that these last weeks had brought was marked by the freedom with which husband and wife talked not only about the future, but about the past. Isabelle tried to tell her husband what had been going on within her at the trial, and since then.
"I know," she said, "that you will say I can't understand, that my feeling is only a woman's squeamishness or ignorance…. But, John, I can't bear to think of our going back to it, living on in that way, the hard way of success, as it would be in New York."