“It’s not what I think but what you think,” he said gently.
“Could I see her sometimes?”
“As often as you like. She would spend her vacations with you, of course.”
The lump in her throat began to ache again. Her gaze travelled beyond the cañon below, across the Twenty-Six Mile Desert and the Forty Mile Desert to the Pine Nut Mountains. There it rested for a long time. She drew in her breath with a deep ragged sigh that was almost a sob. “She’d better go. This is no life for a little girl. I want her to have a chance to—to—be happy and live with good people.”
“Is it any life for a young woman to lead?” he asked, his blue eyes fixed steadily on her.
A faint flag of colour fluttered in her wan cheeks. He had never before broken down the outposts of her reserve. She felt her pulse beating. His impersonal friendliness had suddenly become a close and vital thing.
“Why speak of that? I made my choice years ago,” she said. She thought, but did not say, that the hard and bitter facts of existence cannot be talked away. They are as immovable as the Sierras.
“We have to make fresh choices every day,” he told her. “Do you think your life can go on now the same as it did before? It can’t. There’s a gulf between you and—him. Have you any hope that it can be bridged?”
“No.”
“Or that you can do him any good by staying with him?”