for any man just as I could give her to him. And I'm
goin' to pay back that money if I have to sell this strip of poor dirt,
that's what I'm goin' to do. Yes, sir, even if it's ten years after they
are married. Chyd is off at school now, and has been for a long time;
only comes home for a while at vacation, and it seems to me that if
he's goin' to be a doctor it's time he was at it. But I understand that
they are goin' to send him to another place after he gits through with
this one. I don't know much about him, but they say that he's a
first-rate sort of a fellow. Oh, I knowed him well enough when he was
little, but I haven't seen so very much of him since he growed up.
Guinea thinks all the world of him, of course, and says that they were
born for each other. Gimme that plow here. You don't know how to tote it
nohow. I'm not goin' right straight back to the field; I'm goin' to the
house. Them hot ashes is on me an inch thick."

I let him take the plow; I left him at the draw bars, and with heavy and
dragging feet I climbed up to my room. I sat down to my desk, but not
with elbows resting on the board, not with my chin in my hands; I
couldn't bear to think of that attitude. Now, I understood why she had
said "Oh" with such coolness when I had declared that I hated doctors.
My heart was freezing, my head was hot, and in a fevered fancy I saw
Guinea and that boy playing up and down the rivulet. I saw them wading
in the water; heard him tell her that when they grew up she must be his
wife, and I saw her, holding her dress about her ankles, look up at him
and smile. I knew that he had never been awkward, I knew that he looked
like Bentley, knew that he would have made fun of me, and down in my
heart there was a poisonous hatred, yellow, green, venomous. I am
seeking to hide nothing; I cannot paint myself as a generous and
high-minded man. When stirred, I seem to have more rank sap than other
men--less reason, more senseless passion. I roared at the picture,
sitting there gripping the desk, and frightened it away; and to myself I
acknowledged the faults which I now set forth, but an acknowledgment of
a fault is not within itself virtue. The fool's recourse is to call
himself a fool, to upbraid himself, curse himself and then in
graciousness to pardon himself. You might as well reason with a
rattlesnake, striking at you--might as well seek to temporize and argue
with a dog drooling hydrophobic foam, as to tell the human heart