Page:Cather--One of ours.djvu/66

52 again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his mild and reasonable mood.

“What are you going to do after a while, Ernest? Do you mean to farm all your life?”

“Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I’d be at it before now. What makes you ask that?”

“Oh, I don’t know! I suppose people must think about the future sometime. And you’re so practical.”

“The future, eh?” Ernest shut one eye and smiled.

“That’s a big word. After I get a place of my own and have a good start, I’m going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I’ll marry a nice girl and bring her back.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s enough, if it turns out right, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps. It wouldn’t be for me. I don’t believe I can ever settle down to anything. Don’t you feel that at this rate there isn’t much in it?”

“In what?”

“In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you’re glad to be alive; it’s a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it’s a workday or a holiday, it’s all the same in the end. At night you go to bed—nothing has happened.”

“But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your own mind? If I get through my work, and get an afternoon off to see my friends like this, it’s enough for me.”

“Is it? Well, if we’ve only got once to live, it seems like there ought to be something well, something splendid about life, sometimes.”

Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude