The Desert and the Sown | Page 7

skirts with one hand, the other was raised to her hair which was blowing across her forehead in bewitching disorder. Every gesture and turn of her shape announced that she was pretty and gay in the knowledge of her power. It was Chrissy, walking with Lieutenant Lane.
"Where are you--ridiculous ones? Don't you want to come with us?"
"'Now who were they?'" Paul quoted derisively out of the dark.
"We are going to Captain Dawson's to play Hearts. Come! Don't be stupid!"
"We are not stupid, we are busy!" Moya called back.
"Busy! Doing what?"
"Oh, deciding things. We are talking about the Poor Man."
"The poor men, she means." Christine's high laugh followed the lieutenant's speech, as the pair went on.
"He is a bore!" Moya declared. "We can't even use him for a joke."
"Speaking of Lane, dear?"
"The Poor Man. Are you sure that you've got a sense of humor, Paul? Can't we have charity for jokes among the other poor things?"
Paul had raised himself to the step beside her. "You are shivering," he said, "I must let you go in."
"I'm not shivering--I'm chattering," she mocked. "Why should I go in when we are going to be really serious?"
Paul waited a moment; his breath came short, as if he were facing a postponed dread. "Moya, dear," he began in a forced tone, "I can't help my constraints and convictions that bore you so, any more than you can help your light heart--God bless it--and your theory of class which to me seems mediaeval. I have cringed to it, like the coward a man is when he is in love. But now I want you to know me."
He took her hand and kissed it repeatedly, as if impressing upon her the one important fact back of all hypothesis and perilous efforts at statement.
"Well, are you bidding me good-by?"
"You must give me time," he said. "It takes courage in these days for a good American to tell the girl he loves that his father was a hired man."
He smiled, but there was little mirth and less color in his face.
"What absurdity!" cried Moya. Then glancing at him she added quickly, "My father is a hired man. Most fathers who are worth anything are!"
"My father was because he came of that class. His father was one before him. His mother took in tailoring in the village where he was born. He had only the commonest common-school education and not much of that. At eleven he worked for his board and clothes at my Grandfather Van Elten's, and from that time he earned his bread with his hands. Don't imagine that I'm apologizing," Paul went on rapidly. "The apology belongs on the other side. In New York, for instance, the Bogardus blood is quite as good as the Bevier or the Broderick or the Van Elten; but up the Hudson, owing to those chances or mischances that selected our farming aristocracy for us, my father's people had slipped out of their holdings and sunk to the poor artisan class which the old Dutch landowners held in contempt."
"We are not landowners," said Moya. "What does it matter? What does any of it matter?"
"It matters to be honest and not sail under false colors. I thought you would not speak of the Poor Man as you do if you knew that I am his son."
"Money has nothing to do with position in the army. I am a poor man's daughter."
"Ah, child! Your father gives orders--mine took them, all his life."
"My father has to take what he gives. There is no escaping 'orders.' Even I know that!" said Moya. A slight shiver passed over her as she spoke, laughing off as usual the touch of seriousness in her words.
"Why did you do that?" Paul touched her shoulder. "Is it the wind? There is a wind creeping down these steps." He improved the formation slightly in respect to the wind.
"Listen!" said Moya. "Isn't that your mother walking on the porch? Father, I know, is writing. She will be lonely."
"She is never lonely, more or less. It is always the same loneliness--of a woman widowed for years."
"How very much she must have cared for him!" Moya sighed incredulously. What a pity, she thought, that among the humbler vocations Paul's father should have been just a plain "hired man." Cowboy, miner, man-o'-war's man, even enlisted man, though that were bad enough--any of these he might have been in an accidental way, that at least would have been picturesque; but it is only the possession of land, by whatsoever means or title, that can dignify an habitual personal contact with it in the form of soil. That is one of the accepted prejudices which one does not meddle with at nineteen. "Youth is conservative because it is afraid." Moya, for all her fighting blood, was traditionally and in