Raquel knew no arts. Three months before she would have said, “Well, she and I kept to opposite sides of the corral.” But three months had tempered her frankness with consideration. Three months of association with Anne had added ease to her forthright manners. “Lois is even more beautiful than when you saw her, Jimmy,” she answered, “and she is so popular. All the girls in the school were crazy about her.” “She would be, she would be,” Jimmy nodded as a matter of course. A sharp pang of something or other set Raquel’s blood racing. “I haven’t heard from Uncle in some time. I wonder how they are.” Raquel started to speak. Anne had told her on the way to the train that Lois was gone, and why. But as she hesitated, Jimmy pressed, “Did she make a good roommate? That’s what I want to know. She didn’t answer my letter, but Uncle wrote me a note in which he said that he knew Lois would do all she could.” “Jimmy, I had the nicest roommate in the whole school,” Raquel looked straight at Jimmy with disarming candor. And Jimmy, mere man that he was, was foiled by this newly developed astuteness. Raquel had a sense of shame. Never before had she deceived, unless it were unintentionally by silence. A confusion of pressing reasons flooded her mind. If they didn’t think enough of Jimmy to let him know, why should she do it? Maybe he’d get a letter any day now--he’d have to go straight where they were then. Oh, he mustn’t do that! He mustn’t go to Lois again. And she heard herself talking of the war, of her Thanksgiving vacation, and Anne and the Marvin family. “Their house was just like a palace inside. But you’re used to that. You’d understand them, too. They were just folks. After you got used to their ways you could see how they were just human beings like us Texans underneath.” Jimmy laughed. “Well, I guess we are all pretty much alike under the skin.” “No, we aren’t, Jimmy. Take Dad for instance. He thinks honor is dearer than life, and that justice is his, not the Lord’s--nor the state’s. When he shot those three men who killed his Dad he said he was going to get them the same way they got him--in the back. And he did. Every one of them. “When he had to serve three years he didn’t complain. Said it was worth it. But he thought a year of his life was worth more to the community than any one of the men, living.” “It was, at that,” Jimmy agreed. “Well, I think people should pay up for what they do.” She said it so fiercely that Jimmy looked at her in mock amazement. They had been talking in low tones, but Dad was reminiscing, and his narrative filled the room. “Yes,” he recounted, “I’ve fit to make this country a place for white men to live in; Indians, varmints, bad men an’ killers, are pretty near cleaned out. I never thought we’d have to go clear back across them plains, and across the ocean, to a country where cows, I hear, is family pets tied up in the parlor, and men tote knives instid of guns, to keep it fittin’.