“Awright. Why don’t you get the cook-book and set in the hammock a spell?”
The girl laughed: “Don’t you like mother’s cooking?”
“S’all right for me. But I don’t cal’late your mother’s going to cook for the fella you hitch up with.”
Eris turned up her nose: “Don’t worry. I shan’t ever marry. Not any boy in this town, anyway. Probably I’ll never marry.... I’ll not have time,” she added, half to herself.
Odell, who was going, stopped.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“An actress ought not to marry. She ought to give every moment to her art,” explained the girl naïvely.
“Is—that—so? Well, you can chase that idea outa your head, my girl, because you ain’t never going to be no actress. And that’s that!”
“Some day,” said Eris, with a flushed smile, “I shall follow my own judgment and give myself to art.... And that’s that!”
As they stood there, father and daughter, confronting each other in the pale April sunshine, the great herd-bull bellowed from the cattle-barn, shaking the still air with his thunderous reverberations. He was to be shot that evening.