ned to add:

"Not that I'm really sick. Mrs. Meeker, like yourself, persists in
treating me as if I were. I'm feeling fine--perfectly well, only I'm not
as rugged as I want to be."

She had read that victims of the white plague always talk in this
cheerful way about themselves, and she worked on without replying, and
this gave him an excellent opportunity to study her closely. She was
taller than most women and lithely powerful. There was nothing delicate
about her--nothing spirituelle--on the contrary, she was markedly
full-veined, cheerful and humorous, and yet she had responded several
times to an allusive phrase with surprising quickness. She did so now as
he remarked: "Somebody, I think it was Lowell, has said 'Nature is all
very well for a vacation, but a poor substitute for the society of good
men and women.' It's beautiful up at the mill, but I want some one to
enjoy it with, and there is no one to turn to, except Landon, and he's
rather sad and self-absorbed--you know why. If I were here--in the
valley--you and I could ride together now and then, and you could show me
all the trails. Why not let me come here and board? I'm going to ask your
mother, if I may not do so?"

Quite naturally he grew more and more personal. He told her of his
father, the busy director of a lumber company, and of his mother, sickly
and inert.

"She ought never to have married," he said, with darkened brow. "Not one
of her children has even a decent constitution. I'm the most robust of
them all, and I must seem a pretty poor lot to you. However, I wasn't
always like this, and if that young devil, Frank Meeker, hadn't tormented
me out of my sleep, I would have shown you still greater improvement.
Don't you see that it is your duty to let me stay here where I can build
up on your cooking?"

She turned this aside. "Mother don't think much of my cooking. She says I
can handle a brandin'-iron a heap better than I can a rollin'-pin."

"You certainly can ride," he replied, with admiring accent. "I shall
never forget the picture you made that first time I saw you racing to
intercept the stage. Do you _know_ how fine you are physically? You're a
wonder." She uttered some protest, but he went on: "When I think of my
mother and sisters in comparison with you, they seem like caricatures of
women. I know I oughtn't to say such things of my mother--she really is
an exceptional person--but a woman should be something more than mind. My
sisters