“It is so critical in your case that you ought to consult a doctor rather than take lay advice.”

“Jim Galway says that the thorough way, I mulched my soil before putting in my first crop of alfalfa is a model for all future settlers,” he ventured.

She remarked that Jim was always encouraging to new-comers, and remarked this in a way that implied that some new-comers possibly needed hazing.

“And I am up at dawn and hard at it for six hours before midday.”

“Yes, it is wonderful!” she admitted, with a mock show of being overwhelmingly impressed.  “Nobody in the world ever worked ten hours a day before!”

“I’m doing more than any man that I pay two-fifty.  I do perspire, and if you don’t call that earning your bread with the sweat of your brow, why this is an astoundingly illogical world!”

“There is a great difference between sporadic display and that continuity which is the final proof of efficiency,” she corrected him.

“Long, involved sentences often indicate the loss of an argument!” declared Jack.

“There isn’t any argument!” said Mary with superior disinterestedness.

By common inspiration they had established a truce of nonsense.  She still called him Jack; he still called her Mary.  It was the only point of tacit admission that they had ever met before he asked her to show a prospective settler a parcel of land.

Their new relations were as the house of cards of fellowship:  cards of glass, iridescent and brittle, mocking the idea that there could be oblivion of the scene in Lang’s store, the crack of Leddy’s pistol in the arroyo, or the pulse of Jack’s artery under her thumb!  She was sure that he could forget these experiences, even if she could not.  That was his character, as she saw it, free of clinging roots of yesterday’s events, living some new part every day.

In the house of cards she set up a barrier, which he saw as a veil over her eyes.  Not once had he a glimpse of their depths.  There was only the surface gleam of sunbeams and sometimes of rapier-points, merry but significant.  She frequently rode out to the pass and occasionally, when his day’s work was done, he would ride to the foot of the range to meet her, and as they came back he often sang, but never whistled.  Indeed, he had ceased to whistle altogether.  Perhaps he regarded the omission as an insurance against duels.

Aside from nonsense they had common interests in cultural and daily life, from the Eternal Painter’s brushwork to how to dress a salad.  She did extend her approval for the generous space which he was allowing for flower-beds, and advised him in the practical construction of his kitchen; while the Doge decorated the living-room with Delia Robbias, which, however, never arrived at the express office.  He was a neighbor always at home in the Ewold house.  The Doge revelled in their disputations, yet never was really intimate or affectionate as he was with Jim Galway, who knew not the Pitti, the Prado, nor the Louvre, and could not understand the intoning of Dante in the original as Jack could, thanks to his having been brought up in libraries and galleries.