He would not have her of a different and coarser fibre, this exquisite Southern creature, charming, delicate, set like a rare exotic in the humble window of his hut.
It was not her fault. It was his. It was his place to turn the hut into a palace for his Queen; and so he would, when the Wise Men came out of the East and built the Magic City.
When the Fools had made the plains a fit place for human beings to inhabit, planting trees to draw down the reluctant rain from the clouds, sowing seed and raising crops sometimes, to their surprise and the amazement of those who heard of it, the Wise Men would appear and buy the land, and the building of great cities would begin.
Already they had reared a town that dared approach in size to a city on the edge of the desert, but what had happened?
An angry cyclone, hearing of it, had come along and snatched it into the clouds.
Furious at sight of its spick and span newness, its yellow frame shanties and shining shingles, it had carried it off as if it had been a hen coop and set it down somewhere in Texas, a state that had been longer settled and was therefore a better place for houses and fences, and left it there.
Then the Wise Men, growing discouraged, had gone away.
But they would come again, he promised himself. They would come again. They must. Not to pass through in long vestibule trains whose sparks out of pure fiendishness lighted the furious prairie fires that were so hard to put out, smothering the innocent occupants of the dugouts in their sleep and burning their grain. Not to gaze wild-eyed through the shining windows of these splendid cars as they passed on and on to some more promising unwind-blown country, to build there their beautiful cities of marble and of stone.
They would come to stay.
When?