Mrs. Kate
had not taken the view-point which appealed to him, but had been
self-consciously virtuous in her determination to lend Ford a helping
hand, and resentful because Josephine failed to feel also the urge of
uplifting mankind.

Mason, poor man, was vaguely nettled; he did not see that Ford needed
any settlement-worker encouragement. If he was let alone, and his moral
regeneration forgotten, and he himself treated just like any other man,
Mason felt that Ford would thereby have all the encouragement he needed.
Ford was once more plainly content with life, and was taking it in
twenty-four-hour doses again; healthful doses, these, and different in
every respect from those days spent in the sordid round of ill-living in
town; nor did he flay his soul with doubts lest he should disappoint
this man who trusted him so rashly and so implicitly. Ford was busy at
work which appealed to the best of him. He was thrown into companionship
with men who perforce lived cleanly and naturally, and with Ches Mason,
who was his friend. At meals he sometimes gave thought to Mrs. Kate, and
frequently to Josephine. The first he admired impersonally for her
housewifely skill, and smiled at secretly for her purely feminine
outlook upon life and her positive views upon subjects of which she knew
not half the alphabet. He had discovered that Mason did indeed refrain
from smoking in the house because she discountenanced tobacco; and since
she had a talent for making a man uncomfortably aware of her disapproval
by certain wordless manifestations of scorn for his weaknesses, Ford
also took to throwing away his cigarette before he crossed the bridge on
his way to her domain. He did not, however, go so far as Ches, who kept
his tobacco, pipe, and cigarette papers in the stable, and was always
borrowing "the makings" from his men.

Ford also followed Mason's example in sterilizing his vocabulary
whenever he crossed that boundary between the masculine and feminine
element on the ranch, the bridge. Mrs. Kate did not approve of slang.
Ford found himself carefully eliminating from his speech certain
grammatical inaccuracies in her presence, and would not so much as split
an infinitive if he remembered in time. It was trying, to be sure. Ford
thanked God that he still retained a smattering of the rules he had
reluctantly memorized in school, and that he was not married (at least,
not uncomfortably so), and that he was not compelled to do more than ea