“Suppose I pack the burros and tuck you under my arm and take you, anyway?” he queried, stubbornly.
“I fancy I’d like you to tuck me under your arm,” she replied, with the low laugh that came readily now, “but if you did—it would be as far as you’d get.”
“How so?” he demanded, curiously.
“Why, I’d exercise the prerogative of the eternal feminine and command that time should stand still right there.”
A sweetness and charm, perhaps of other days, a memory of power, haunted face and voice then.
“Time—stand still?” echoed Adam, ponderingly. “Magdalene, you are beyond me.”
“So it seems. I’m a little beyond myself sometimes. You will never see in me the woman who has been courted, loved, spoiled by men.”
“Well, I grasp that, I guess. But I don’t care to see you as such a woman. I might not——”
“Ah! you might not respect me,” she interrupted. “Alas!... But, Wansfell, if I had met you when I was eighteen I would never have been courted and loved and ruined by men.... You don’t grasp that, either.”
Adam had long ceased to curse his density. The simplicity of him antagonized her complexity. His had been the blessed victory over her bitterness, her mockery, her consciousness of despair. His had been the gladness of seeing her grow brown and strong and well, until these early June days had begun to weaken her. That fact had augmented his earnestness to get her to leave the valley. But she was adamant. And all his importunities and arguments and threats she parried with some subtle femininity of action or look or speech that left him bewildered.