“Don’t you think you ought to be?”
“Why?”
Jean clasped her hands around her knee and looked out over the dim hills bathed in the mist of the moonlight. After a while she said: “It must be very lonely for a gentleman in a camp like this.”
“If you are thinking of Loring,” said her father, “he is busy all day and he can go to the mess in the evening.”
“The mess!” exclaimed Jean scornfully. “Yes, fine place for a gentleman, where the men chew tobacco and drink whisky all the evening, and tell stories as long as they are broad!”
“All terribly offensive no doubt to a sensitive soul like your Mr. Loring,” answered Mr. Cameron. “Perhaps,” he added with fine sarcasm, “you would like to have him take his meals with us.”
“Yes, I would like to ask him here sometime. It is good in you to think of it,” replied his daughter calmly.
“It cannot be done, Jean. It cannot be done,” Mr. Cameron said with decision. “Discrimination among the men breeds discontent. I think that we have done full enough for Loring as it is.”
“Do you?” Jean responded, with the audacity of a hot temper. “Well, I do not; but then it was my life that he saved, and perhaps that makes me see the thing differently. I am thinking that when a man saves your life you cannot get rid of the obligation by throwing him a job, as you might toss a bone to a dog. I am thinking that he has some claim on the life that he has given back, and that the other person should spend a little of it in doing something for him.”
“And, pray, what has his being a gentleman to do with all this?” asked Mr. Cameron, whose wrath took the form of sarcasm. “Suppose that Colson or Lynn had saved your life, would you have wished to have him at the house?”