“Nonsense, Lee, don’t be jealous.  Gretzie never takes me anywhere except in a crowd.  And don’t say he’s crooked, or I shall be angry.”

“Well, let him pass,” he went on.  “It’s Charlie Menocal I’ve more in mind.  He talks openly against my project; he calls me a thief and a ruffian; he’s an avowed enemy.  Yet you run around with him as if that were of no importance, as if it made no difference.  The scoundrel no doubt counts it a brilliant bit of smartness to carry about in his car the fiancee of the man he hates, and brags of it.  It reflects on us both, Ruth.  I ask you to consider my feelings at least that far.”

She regarded him speculatively for a time.  Then the touch of obstinacy hardened her chin and pushed up her under lip the barest trifle.  But there was no resentment in her voice when she answered and, indeed, her tone was too casual.

“Oh, nobody pays any particular attention to what Charlie says,” she remarked.  “You surely don’t really believe what you’ve just stated about his bragging?  I don’t.  Of course, he hasn’t brains like Mr. Gretzinger, but he’s gentlemanly.  And he’s very kind.  And so is Mr. Menocal, his father.  I’ve eaten dinner with a party of young folks at their house twice.  Your ideas of them are altogether wrong, for they’ve been at pains to tell me that a business difference like that with you shouldn’t affect personal relations.  I think the same.  But that isn’t all.  You never take me anywhere, you won’t go to the parties and shows and things.  Am I to sit here every day and every night at Sarita Creek until your canal is built?” By now her words were not only casual but carried a trace of disdainfulness.

“No, Ruth,” said he.  “I want you to have a good time and derive every pleasure that you rightly can.  My greatest regret is that I can’t take you and share the fun.  But it goes without saying that I can’t.  Only, Charlie Menocal——­”

“Lee, what’s got into you to-night?  If it were not for Mr. Gretzinger’s and Charlie’s thoughtfulness, I’d have died of lonesomeness long before this.  You know how I hate this life, this homestead business.  You know I’m only waiting until you’ve finished and we can be married and go away where there is something worth while.  Now be reasonable.  You work too hard, so that every little speck looks like a mountain.  And it’s making you narrow, too, or will if you don’t watch out.  I have to kill time somehow till we can be married and so you ought not to find fault with my doing it.  Run along over and talk to Imo in her cabin now, Lee; that’s a good boy.  I didn’t get back home from town last night until after midnight, and I’m sleepy.”

He did not go to Imo’s cabin, but to camp instead.  For the bitterness of his disappointment at his failure to move her made him desire the darkness and solitude of the ride home.  With her, it seemed, he was in a worse predicament than he had been when faced with the problem of his ditch; for that he had found an answer, found something to take hold of.  But she was not like the mesa, to be mastered by sheer will and incessant labour.  Character is intangible, and he found himself balked.  One cannot lay hands on the desires in a heart and pluck them out, or on the spirit and twist it straight.