A Daughter of the Snows eBook

And then he liked her in many different ways for many different things.  For her impulses, and for her passions which were always elevated.  And already, from breathing the Northland air, he had come to like her for that comradeship which at first had shocked him.  There were other acquired likings, her lack of prudishness, for instance, which he awoke one day to find that he had previously confounded with lack of modesty.  And it was only the day before that day that he drifted, before he thought, into a discussion with her of “Camille.”  She had seen Bernhardt, and dwelt lovingly on the recollection.  He went home afterwards, a dull pain gnawing at his heart, striving to reconcile Frona with the ideal impressed upon him by his mother that innocence was another term for ignorance.  Notwithstanding, by the following day he had worked it out and loosened another finger of the maternal grip.

He liked the flame of her hair in the sunshine, the glint of its gold by the firelight, and the waywardness of it and the glory.  He liked her neat-shod feet and the gray-gaitered calves,—­alas, now hidden in long-skirted Dawson.  He liked her for the strength of her slenderness; and to walk with her, swinging her step and stride to his, or to merely watch her come across a room or down the street, was a delight.  Life and the joy of life romped through her blood, abstemiously filling out and rounding off each shapely muscle and soft curve.  And he liked it all.  Especially he liked the swell of her forearm, which rose firm and strong and tantalizing and sought shelter all too quickly under the loose-flowing sleeve.

The co-ordination of physical with spiritual beauty is very strong in normal men, and so it was with Vance Corliss.  That he liked the one was no reason that he failed to appreciate the other.  He liked Frona for both, and for herself as well.  And to like, with him, though he did not know it, was to love.

CHAPTER IX

Vance Corliss proceeded at a fair rate to adapt himself to the Northland life, and he found that many adjustments came easy.  While his own tongue was alien to the brimstone of the Lord, he became quite used to strong language on the part of other men, even in the most genial conversation.  Carthey, a little Texan who went to work for him for a while, opened or closed every second sentence, on an average, with the mild expletive, “By damn!” It was also his invariable way of expressing surprise, disappointment, consternation, or all the rest of the tribe of sudden emotions.  By pitch and stress and intonation, the protean oath was made to perform every function of ordinary speech.  At first it was a constant source of irritation and disgust to Corliss, but erelong he grew not only to tolerate it, but to like it, and to wait for it eagerly.  Once, Carthey’s wheel-dog lost an ear in a hasty contention with a dog of the Hudson Bay, and when the young fellow bent over the animal and discovered the loss, the blended endearment and pathos of the “by damn” which fell from his lips was a relation to Corliss.  All was not evil out of Nazareth, he concluded sagely, and, like Jacob Welse of old, revised his philosophy of life accordingly.