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And Miss Blake's casual treatment of her, half-bluff, half-mocking, her curt, good-humored commands, her cordial bullying, were a rest to nerves more raveled than Sheila knew from her experience in Millings.
It seemed a room transplanted to Millings from some finer soil. Dickie looked at the tapestry because it was the nearest he dared come to looking at Sheila. His hands and knees shook with the terrible beating of his heart. It was not right, thought Dickie resentfully, that any feeling should take hold of a fellow and shake and terrify him so.
As they came back to Millings in the afterglow of a brief Western twilight, she unfastened her veil and showed a quiet, thoughtful face. She thanked him, gave him her hand. "Don't come up, please, Mr. Hudson," she said with that cool composure of which at times she was surprisingly capable. "I shall have my dinner sent up and take a little rest before I go to work."
"That's what every one calls me the men over in the Big Horn country they tell men that are coming to Millings to be sure to look up 'Hudson's Queen. Do they mean the Hotel, Dickie? They do mean the Hotel, don't they, Dickie? that I am The Hudson's Queen?" The truth sometimes presents itself like a withering flame. Dickie got up, put away her hands, walked up and down, then came back to her.
This was different from the hard, dull gold and alkali dust of the Millings country: here were silvery-green miles of range, and purple-green miles of pine forest, and lovely lighter fringes and groves of cottonwood and aspen trees. Here and there were little dots of ranches, visible more by their vivid oat and alfalfa fields than by their small log cabins.
But when he came to the top, Millings dropped away from the reach of his senses. Here was dazzling space, the amazing presence of the mountains, the pressure of the starry sky. Far off already across the flat, that small, dark figure moved. She had left the road, which ran parallel with the mountain range, and was walking over the hard, sparkling crust.
"I don't know how sweet and lovely you can be, Dickie, when you're lit up, but I guess you were awful sweet. Anyway, if you didn't say anything or do anything to scare her, you don't deserve a kickin'. But, just the same, I've a mind to turn you out of Millings." This time, Dickie's look was not ironical. It was terrified. "Oh, Poppa, say! I'll try not to do it again."
"That's very good of you fellows. I didn't know you knew that there was such a person as as me in Millings." "You bet you, we knew. Here goes the waltz. Do you want to Castle it? I worked in a Yellowstone Park Hotel last summer, and I'm wise on dancing." Sheila found herself stretched ceilingwards.
And that was just why, when I thought you was bad, that it drove me crazy. I wonder if you will understand this. You are awful young and awful ignorant. And I have hurt your pride. You are terrible proud for your years, Miss Sheila. I ache all over when I think that I hurt your pretty mouth. I hope it is smiling now. I am moving out of Millings, Me and Momma and Babe.
I need you. I haven't been able to hand in a story like that for years. I'm a burnt-out candle and you're the divine fire. I'm going to educate the life out of you. I'm going to train you till you wish you'd died young and ungrammatical in Millings. I may not be much good myself," he added solemnly, "but God gave me the sense to know the real thing when I see it.
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