“I... oh...”
“I don't want to intrude into your intimate thoughts, dear. But in so far as we can plan together... it may help if...”
She spoke with a touch of reserve that might have been, probably was, shyness.
“There have been men, of course, who—-well, wanted to marry me. This last year. There was one in New York. He used to come out and take me riding in his automobile. I—I always made some of the other girls come with us.”
Doane found it impossible to visualize this picture. When he was last in the States there were no automobiles on the streets. It suggested a condition of which he knew literally nothing, a wholly new set of influences in the life of young people. The thought was alarming; he had to close his eyes on it for a moment. Much as his daughter had seemed like a visitor from another planet, she had never seemed so far off as now. And he fell to thinking, along with this new picture, of the terribly hard struggle they had had out here, since 1900, in rebuilding the mission organization, in training new workers and creating a new morale. He felt tired.... His brain was tired. It would help to get out on the road again, swinging gradually into the rhythm of his forty-inch stride. Once more he would walk himself off, even as he hastened on an errand of rescue.
Betty was speaking again.
“And there's one now. He's in Korea, a mining engineer. He's awfully nice. But I—I don't think I could marry him.”
“Do you love him, Betty?”
“N—no. No, I don't. Though I've wondered, sometimes, about these things....” The person she was wondering about, as she said this, was Jonathan Brachey. Suddenly, with her mind's eye, she saw this clearly. And it was startling. She couldn't so much as mention his name; certainly not to her father, kind and human as he seemed. But she would never hear from him again; not now. If he could live through those first few weeks without so much as writing, he could let the years go. That would have been the test for her sort of nature, and she could understand no other sort.
She compressed her lips. She didn't know that her face showed something of the trouble in her mind. She spoke, bravely, with an abruptness that surprised herself a little, as it surprised him.