For an instant the frankness of the question stunned Mrs. Oakley. She had inherited the impenetrable Scotch reserve on the subject of sentiment, and it seemed to her, while she pondered the question, that there were no words in which she could answer her daughter. Both her vocabulary and her imagination were as innocent of terms of sex as if she were still an infant learning her alphabet. "Well, your father's a mighty good man, Dorinda," she replied evasively. "I know he is, but what made you marry him?" "He's never given me a cross word in his life," Mrs. Oakley pursued, working herself up, as she went on, until she sounded as if she were reciting a Gospel hymn. "I've never heard a complaint from him. There never was a better worker, and it isn't his fault if things have always gone against him." "I know all that," said Dorinda, as implacable as truth, "but what made you marry him? Were you ever in love with him?" Mrs. Oakley's eyes lost suddenly their look of mystic vision and became opaque with memories. "I reckon I sort of took a fancy to him," she responded. "Is there ever any reason why people marry?" A mild regret flickered into the face of the older woman. "I s'pose they think they've got one." She must have been pretty once, Dorinda thought while she watched her. She must have been educated to refinements of taste and niceties of manner; yet marriage had been too strong for her, and had conquered her. "I don't see how you've stood it!" she exclaimed, with the indignant pity of youth. Mrs. Oakley's bleak eyes, from which all inner glory had departed, rested pensively on her daughter. "There ain't but one way to stand things," she returned slowly. "There ain't but one thing that keeps you going and keeps a farm going, and that is religion. If you ain't got religion to lean back on, you'd just as well give up trying to live in the country." "I don't feel that way about religion," Dorinda said obstinately. "I want to be happy." "You're too young yet. Your great-grandfather used to say that most people never came to God as long as there was anywhere else for them to go." "Was that true of great-grandfather?" "It must have been. He told me once that he didn't come to Christ until he had thirsted for blood." To Dorinda this seemed an indirect way to divine grace; but it made her great-grandfather appear human to her for the only time in her life. "But he must have had something else first," she observed logically. "People always seem to have had something else first, or they wouldn't have found out how worthless it is. You must have been in love once, even if you have forgotten it." Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I haven't forgotten it, daughter," she answered. "It's time you were knowing things, I reckon, or you wouldn't be asking." "Yes, it's time I was knowing things," repeated Dorinda. "You told me once that great-grandfather tried to keep you from marrying. Then why did you do it?"