The color crept into his face. "I'm not quitting. I'm going through. The point is whether I'm to ask my friends to carry my load for me."
"What are your friends for?" she demanded, and her eyes were like stars in a field of snow. "Don't you see it's an insult to assume they don't want to stand with you in your trouble? You've been warped. You're eaten up with vain pride." Joyce bit her lip to choke back a swelling in her throat. "The Dave we used to know wasn't like that. He was friendly and sweet. When folks were kind to him he was kind to them. He wasn't like—like an old poker." She fell back helplessly on the simile she had used with her father.
"I don't blame you for feeling that way," he said gently. "When I first came out I did think I'd play a lone hand. I was hard and bitter and defiant. But when I met you-all again—and found you were just like home folks—all of you so kind and good, far beyond any claims I had on you—why, Miss Joyce, my heart went out to my old friends with a rush. It sure did. Maybe I had to be stiff to keep from being mushy."
"Oh, if that's it!" Her eager face, flushed and tender, nodded approval.
"But you've got to look at this my way too," he urged. "I can't repay your father's kindness—yes, and yours too—by letting folks couple your name, even in friendship, with a man who—"
She turned on him, glowing with color. "Now that's absurd, Dave Sanders. I'm not a—a nice little china doll. I'm a flesh-and-blood girl. And I'm not a statue on a pedestal. I've got to live just like other people. The trouble with you is that you want to be generous, but you don't want to give other folks a chance to be. Let's stop this foolishness and be sure-enough friends—Dave."
He took her outstretched hand in his brown palm, smiling down at her.
"All right. I know when I'm beaten."
She beamed. "That's the first honest-to-goodness smile I've seen on your face since you came back."
"I've got millions of 'em in my system," he promised. "I've been hoarding them up for years."
"Don't hoard them any more. Spend them," she urged.