The Texan | Page 8

the edge?"
The man smiled: "And bridged all those ravines!" he pointed to gaps and notches in the level sky-line where the mouths of creek beds and coulees flashed glimpses of far mountains. "Each one of those ravines would have meant a trestle and trestles run into big money."
"And so they built the railroad down here in this ditch where people have to sit and swelter and look at their old shiny rails and scraggly green bushes and dirt walls, while up there only a half a mile away the great rolling plains stretch away to the mountains that seem so near you could walk to them in an hour."
"But, my dear girl, it would not be practical. Railroads are built primarily with an eye to dividends and--" The girl interrupted him with a gesture of impatience.
"I hate things that are practical--hate even the word. There is nothing in all the world so deadly as practicability. It is ruthless and ugly. It disregards art and beauty and all the higher things that make life worth living. It is a monster whose god is dollars--and who serves that god well. What does any tourist know of the real West--the West that lies beyond those level rims of dirt? How much do you or I know of it? The West to us is a thin row of scrub bushes along a narrow, shallow river, with a few little white-painted towns sprinkled along, that for all we can see might be in Illinois or Ohio. I've been away a whole winter and for all the West I've seen I might as well have stayed in Brooklyn."
"But certainly you enjoyed California!"
"California! Yes, as California. But California isn't the West! California is New York with a few orange groves thrown in. It is a tourist's paradise. A combination of New York and Palm Beach. The real West lies east of the Rockies, the uncommercialized, unexploited--I suppose you would add, the unpractical West. A New Yorker gets as good an idea of the West when he travels by train to California as a Californian would get of New York were he to arrive by way of the tube and spend the winter in the Fritz-Waldmore."
"I rather liked California, what little I saw of it. A business trip does not afford an ideal opportunity for sight seeing."
"You like Newport and Palm Beach, too."
The man ignored the interruption.
"But, at least, this trip has combined a good bit of business with a very big bit of pleasure. It is two years since I have seen you and----"
"And so you're going to tell me for the twenty-sixth time in three days that you still love me, and that you want me to marry you, and I'll have to say 'no' again, and explain that I'm not ready to marry anybody." She regarded him with an air of mock solemnity. "But really Mr. Winthrop Adams Endicott I think you have improved since you struck out for yourself into the wilds of--where was it, Ohio, or some place."
"Cincinnati," answered the man a trifle stiffly. The girl shuddered. "I had to change cars there once." Again she eyed him critically. "Yes, two years have made a really noticeable improvement. Do the Cincinnati newspapers always remember to use your whole name or do they dare to refer to Winthrop A. Endicott. If I were a reporter I really believe I'd try it once. If you keep on improving, some day somebody is going to call you Win."
The man flushed: "Are you never serious?" he asked.
"Never more so than this minute."
"You say you are not ready to many. You expect to marry, then, sometime?"
"I don't expect to. I'm going to."
"Will you marry me when you are ready?"
The girl laughed. "Yes, if I can't find the man I want, I think I shall. But he must be somewhere," she continued, after a pause during which her eyes centred upon the point where the two gleaming rails vanished into the distance. "He must be impractical, and human, and--and elemental. I'd rather be smashed to pieces in the Grand Canyon, than live for ever on the Erie Canal!"
"Aren't you rather unconventional in your tastes----?"
"If I'm not, I'm a total failure! I hate conventionality! And lines of least resistance! And practical things! It is the men who are the real sticklers for convention. The same kind of men that follow the lines of least resistance and build their railroads along them--because it is practical!
"I don't see why you want to marry me!" she burst out resentfully. "I'm not conventional, nor practical. And I'm not a line of least resistance!"
"But I love you. I have always loved you, and----"
The girl interrupted him with a quick little laugh, which held no trace of resentment. "Yes, yes, I know. I believe you do.