“Oh my God,” he said, “No! No! No!”
There must have been a thousand who laughed at him and called him a name. But the others were gone wild again. And with them the Inger was shouting his wildest, so that for a moment he did not hear Lory. Then he realized that she was standing beside him crying with the few hundred their ‘No!’”
He took her by the shoulder and shook her roughly.
“What do you want to do that for?” he said. “Are you a white feather?”
It smote him with dull surprise that she was so calm.
She answered him as she might have spoken on the mountain trail:
“If that means that I ain’t like them,” she said, “then I am a white feather, I guess.”
“But look here,” he burst out, “you’re no mollycoddle. You’re the West! You know how things go—”
She broke in then, with her face turned toward the hall again.