ne-strung, an'
sensitive, an' delicate. You gotta handle 'em right-side up, glass, with
care. Well, that's what you remind me of. And I'm goin' to make it
my job to see you get handled an' gentled in the same way. You're
as different from other women as that kind of a mare is from scrub
work-horse mares. You're a thoroughbred. You're clean-cut an' spirited,
an' your lines...

"Say, d'ye know you've got some figure? Well, you have. Talk about
Annette Kellerman. You can give her cards and spades. She's Australian,
an' you're American, only your figure ain't. You're different. You're
nifty--I don't know how to explain it. Other women ain't built like you.
You belong in some other country. You're Frenchy, that's what. You're
built like a French woman an' more than that--the way you walk, move,
stand up or sit down, or don't do anything."

And he, who had never been out of California, or, for that matter, had
never slept a night away from his birthtown of Oakland, was right in
his judgment. She was a flower of Anglo-Saxon stock, a rarity in the
exceptional smallness and fineness of hand and foot and bone and grace
of flesh and carriage--some throw-back across the face of time to the
foraying Norman-French that had intermingled with the sturdy Saxon
breed.

"And in the way you carry your clothes. They belong to you. They seem
just as much part of you as the cool of your voice and skin. They're
always all right an' couldn't be better. An' you know, a fellow kind of
likes to be seen taggin' around with a woman like you, that wears her
clothes like a dream, an' hear the other fellows say: 'Who's Bill's new
skirt? She's a peach, ain't she? Wouldn't I like to win her, though.'
And all that sort of talk."

And Saxon, her cheek pressed to his, knew that she was paid in full for
all her midnight sewings and the torturing hours of drowsy stitching
when her head nodded with the weariness of the day's toil, while she
recreated for herself filched ideas from the dainty garments that had
steamed under her passing iron.

"Say, Saxon, I got a new name for you. You're my Tonic Kid. That's what
you are, the Tonic Kid."

"And you'll never get tired of me?" she queried.

"Tired? Why we was made for each other."

"Isn't it wonderful, our meeting, Billy? We might never have met. It was
just by accident that we did."

"We was born lucky," he proclaimed. "That's a cinch."

"Maybe it was more than luck," she ventured.

"Sure. It just