Bankruptcy -- Fiction; Gold mines and mining -- Alaska -- Fiction; Oakland (Calif.) -- Fiction; Western stories; Women pioneers -- Fiction
Daylight sat dumfounded. The hurt showed itself plainly in his face.
"Oh, you don't understand," she cried wildly, beginning to lose
self-control--"It's not that way I mean. I do like you; the more I've
known you the more I've liked you. And at the same time the more I've
known you the less would I care to marry you."
This enigmatic utterance completed Daylight's perplexity.
"Don't you see?" she hurried on. "I could have far easier married the
Elam Harnish fresh from Klondike, when I first laid eyes on him long
ago, than marry you sitting before me now."
He shook his head slowly. "That's one too many for me. The more you
know and like a man the less you want to marry him. Familiarity breeds
contempt--I guess that's what you mean."
"No, no," she cried, but before she could continue, a knock came on the
door.
"The ten minutes is up," Daylight said.
His eyes, quick with observation like an Indian's, darted about the
room while she was out. The impression of warmth and comfort and
beauty predominated, though he was unable to analyze it; while the
simplicity delighted him--expensive simplicity, he decided, and most of
it leftovers from the time her father went broke and died. He had
never before appreciated a plain hardwood floor with a couple of
wolfskins; it sure beat all the carpets in creation. He stared
solemnly at a bookcase containing a couple of hundred books. There was
mystery. He could not understand what people found so much to write
about.
Writing things and reading things were not the same as doing things,
and himself primarily a man of action, doing things was alone
comprehensible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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