“Why isn’t he married?” I said to Perolli.
“Did they give the girl he wanted to some one else?”
“How could they, when he would have been a baby then?” said Perolli, indignant at my stupidity. “No. When he was old enough to marry he paid the girl’s family and arranged her marriage to some one else. It is well known why he has not married; he does not want to marry a woman of the mountains, and he knows no other women.”
“And in my country,” I said to Lulash, “I think it would be better if parents thought more about the young man’s family.”
“Yes,” he replied, “if they thought about the character of that family, as they would doubtless do in America. Here, they think more about the lands and herds and strong fighting men that the tribe has. I have often thought at night—for I lie awake a great deal, thinking about my people—that we would have better children if the women were free to choose their own husbands. They would choose men who were young and strong and beautiful. Also the young men would choose the strongest and most beautiful girls. There is another thing, too. I believe there is something like a spirit between two people, something that knows more than their brains do about what their children will be, and that that spirit would lead them into better marriages if they could listen to it. I do not say it very well, because there is no word for it, but I understand it. I would like to see my people try the American way,” he repeated.
He rose to his six feet of height, splendid in fine white wool and silken sash, the jewel-studded chains clinking together on his chest, and swung the rifle again on his back. “I will go now to my own house,” he said. “If the zaushka from America would follow me and drink coffee before my fire, the path her feet would take would always be flowery with spring to my eyes.”
There is something contagious in that sort of thing. “Say to him that my feet will be happy on the path,” I said to the amused Perolli.
“Glory to your lips!” said Lulash. “Glory forever to the little feet that brought you to Thethis!”
The little feet were wearing at that moment two pairs of wrinkled, thick woolen stockings, indescribably ludicrous beneath the flapping legs of trousers around which I had not rewound the soaked woolen leggings, and Perolli and I were helpless with laughter as soon as the door had closed behind Lulash.
“How am I ever going to get to his house?” I asked, wiping my eyes.