ing often brings to flout the compromises of
the confusion of the evening's weariness. The inspiriting, cool air of
night electrified by the sun cleared her vision. She saw all the pictures
on the slate of yesterday and their message plainly, as something that
could not be erased by any Buddhistic ritual of reiterated phrase.

"No, everything is not the same, not even the ride--not yet!" she
admitted. "But time will make it so--time and a sense of humor, which I
hope I have."

XI

SENOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES

Jack lounged in an armchair in the Galway sitting-room with his bandaged
leg bolstered on a stool after Dr. Patterson had fished a bit of lead
out of the wound. Tribute overflowed from the table to the chairs and
from the chairs to the floor; pineapples, their knobby jackets all
yellow from ripening in the field, with the full succulency of root-fed
and sun-drawn flavor; monstrous navel oranges, leaden with the weight of
juice, richer than cloth of gold and velvet soft; and every fruit of the
fertile soil and benignant climate; and jellies, pies, and custards. But
these were only the edibles. There were flowers in equal abundance. They
banked the windows.

"It's Jasper Ewold's idea to bring gifts when you call," explained Jim
Galway. "Jasper is always sowing ideas and lots of them have sprung up
and flourished."

Jack had not been in Little Rivers twenty-four hours, and he had played a
part in its criminal annals and become subject to all the embarrassment
of favors of a royal bride or a prima donna who is about to sail. In a
bower, amazed, he was meeting the world of Little Rivers and its wife.
Men of all ages; men with foreign accent; men born and bred as farmers;
men to whom the effect of indoor occupation clung; men still weak, but
with red corpuscles singing a song of returning health in their
arteries--strapping, vigorous men, all with hands hardened by manual
labor and in their eyes the far distances of the desert, in contrast to
the sparkle of oasis intimacy.

Women with the accent of college classrooms; women who made plural nouns
the running mates of singular verbs; women who were novices in
housework; women drilled in drudgery from childhood--all expanding, all
dwelling in a democracy that had begun its life afresh in a new land,
and all with the wonder of gardens where there had been only sagebrush
in their beings.

There was something at odds with Jack's experience of desert towns in th