Pluckily daring, she took him at his word. “I was only wondering at the different men I find in you. Before I have known you a dozen hours I discover in you the poet and the man of action, the schoolboy and the philosopher, the sentimentalist and the cynic, and—may I say it?—the gentleman and the blackguard. One feels a sense of loss. You should have specialized. You would have made such a good soldier, for instance. Pity you didn’t go to West Point.”
“Think so?” He was immensely flattered at her interest in him.
“Yes. You surely missed your calling. You were born for a soldier; cavalry, I should say. What an ornament to society you would have been if your energies had found the right vent! But they didn’t find it—and you craved excitement, I suppose. Perhaps you had to go the way you did.”
“Therefore I am what I am? Please particularize.”
“I can’t, because I don’t understand you. But I think this much is true, that you have set yourself against all laws of God and man. Yet you are not consistent, since you are better than your creed. You tell yourself there shall be no law for you but your own will, and you find there is, something in you stronger than desire that makes you shrink at many things. You can kill in fair fight, but you can’t knife a man in the back, can you?”
“I never have.”
“You have a dreadfully perverted set of rules, but you play by them. That’s why I know I’m safe with you, even when you are at your worst.”
She announced this boldly, just as if she had no doubts.
“Oh, you know you’re safe, do you?”
“Of course I do. You were once a gentleman and you can’t forget it entirely. That’s the weakness in your philosophy of total depravity.” “You speak with an assurance you don’t always feel, I reckon. And I expect I wouldn’t bank too much on those divinations of yours, if I were you.” He rolled over so that he could face her more directly. “You’ve been mighty frank, Miss Messiter, and I take off my hat to your sand. Now I’m going to be frank awhile. You interest me. I never met a woman that interested me so much. But you do a heap more than interest me. No, you sit right there and listen. Your cheeky pluck and that insolent, indifferent beauty of yours made a hit with me the first minute I saw you that night. I swore I’d tame you, and that’s why I brought you to the ranch. Your eye flashed a heap too haughty for me to give you the go-by. Mind you, I meant to be master. I meant to make you mine as much as that dog that licked my hand before we started. What I meant then I still mean, but in a different way.