Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/244

 happens to cattle if before you sell them you feed them a lot of salt and then fill them up with water? That's what those fellows did, and still do. Watering stock's the name for it."

"If you're speaking of my grandfather, Tom"

"You've named him," he said, and relapsed into sulky silence.

But if he sang and whistled less around the room, he still had his moments of boyish passionate love for Kay. He would come in, weary and lamer than usual, to draw her down into his arms and sit for long periods of quiet, content just to hold her and rest his head against her.

"You still loving me, Kay?"

"I'll never stop. I can't. You know that."

Her personal daintiness never ceased to surprise and delight him, her fragrant bath powder and soap, the care she gave to her short sleek hair, the ribbons in her undergarments, laboriously inserted after each laundering.

"Say, I believe you'd put ruffles on a bunk house towel!"

"You see them, don't you? And like them?"

"I like everything about you," he would tell her solemnly. "You're prouder'n a wildcat, and you can be right ornery at times too. But I'm for you."

But sometimes he picked up and looked at her delicate, fastidiously cared for hands.

"You brought them to the wrong market," he told her once. "I can just remember my old lady's hands; they sure felt like shoe leather."

She suspected him of inarticulate depths of sentiment about his mother.

He tried to please her, too, those early days when each was painfully learning the other. Put on his coat to go down to meals, with only a protest now and then. "Making a regular dude out of me, aren't you?" Shaved carefully and often, even blacked his boots!

"What pains me," he told her once, surveying himself in the mirror, "I can't go out and hire a hall to show myself off in!"

Clare seldom entered his mind at all. So lightly had