Page:The man on horseback (IA manonhorseback00abdurich).pdf/35

Rh incompleteness seemed a lovely sketch for something larger, finer, more splendid; just a sketch of happy, seductive hints with the high-lights of womanhood yet missing.

Tom took her narrow, white hand, looking upon her admiringly and approvingly. She was dressed in foamy silver lace over shimmering rose-pink satin, with contrasting moire ribbons in deep purple and a cluster of purple satin orchids at her high waist line.

Tom laughed. He remembered how he had seen her the year before, on the Killicott ranch where she had been spending the summer together with her parents, in riding breeches, a khaki coat, a blue silk tie loosely knotted around her slim throat, and her hair pinned up carelessly beneath a flopping, mannish stetson, riding the range alongside of him and glorying in the speed and tang and zest of it.

"By Ginger, Bertha," he said, "you've sure changed some. Now that gown of yours," he was studying it naively. I lay you my rock bottom dollar it's from Paris."

Bertha smiled rather languidly.

"I am afraid you would lose your bet, Tom," she replied. "This gown is not from Paris. I bought it in Berlin. Had it made there" And, as if returning to a subject that was uppermost in her mind: "You don't have to go to Paris any more for gowns or, oh, 'most anything. You can get everything you want in Berlin. Not only frocks and frills, but beauty, and culture, and big things, worthwhile things! Why, compared to Germany, America is"

"Daughter," cut in her mother dryly, "aren't you forgetting that you are an American?"

"Dad is a German. Aren't you, Dad?"

Martin Wedekind flushed an angry red. "I was