Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/247



"I say, will this everlasting wind never stop blowing?"

"It is disagreeable," he murmured, without looking at her.

"Disagreeable? It's horrible! I detest the country and everybody in it!"

Mrs. Rathburn shook her head reprovingly, but at the same moment another violent gust swept around the corner and lifted not only that lady's broad-brimmed hat, but her expensive "transformation."

Mrs. Rathburn replaced it with guilty haste, and declared furiously:

"I must say I agree with my daughter—the country and its people are equally impossible."

"I'm sorry," Disston replied contritely. "I shouldn't have urged you to come, but I was hoping you would like it—its picturesqueness, the unconventionality, and the dozen-and-one other things which appeal to me so strongly. In my enthusiasm, perhaps I exaggerated."

"I can't see anything picturesque in discomfort," Miss Rathburn retorted. "There's nothing picturesque in trying to bathe in water that curdles when you put soap in it, and makes your hands like nutmeg graters; or in servants who call you by your first name; or in trying to ride scraggly horses that have no gaits and shake you to pieces; or anything even moderately interesting about a country where there are no trees to sit under and nothing to look at but sagebrush, and rocks, and prairie dogs, and mountains, and not a soul that one can know socially!"

"I had no notion you disliked it out here so much, Beth," he replied gravely.

But he was not sufficiently apologetic, not sufficiently humble. She went on in a tone in which spite was uppermost: