Ainslee's Magazine, February 1913 — page 146: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

136 big man without possessing great height or breadth. There was a sense of power in the movements and stillnesses of his body which made people think of him as physically large, since the human mind—being very material in its rea- sonings—associates the idea of mighti- ness with bulk. An elderly maiden who wrote verses for magazines had embar- rassed him once by telling him before a large company that he made her think of ‘fa sword in a scabbard.” It was not an inapt figure of speech to apply to Jim Kerrall, though ‘a knife in the sheath” might better have fitted his Westernism. His muscularity was steellike, poised, unified under his tanned exterior like a knife blade; and the leap of it was like the lightning leap of a knife. Jim’s eyes were a very light brilliant gray, without a trace of the blue or green which generally tempers light-gray eyes. They were strangely, not softly, pale and luminous, as if they had taken on the color and meaning of the desert where he had been born, and where he had lived until he wrested his fortune from it. They were inscrutable, alluring, like the desert ; and, like the desert, Jim Kerrall seemed to comprehend, master, and ab- sorb all persons and things that he re- ceived into his life. He was self-lawed; his codes were the codes of his nature. In that, too, he was the desert’s son. The sojourner in the desert can live by no law but the desert’s law of life. Codes and sentiments from otherwhere will not preserve him there when the desert is roused to storm. Helen Kerrall had tried to bring gov- erning codes from otherwhere into the life of the desert’s son; and had called on them in vain to shelter her when the storm broke. She could not view her action at all from his standpoint, and was as far from understanding Jim Kerrall as if they had never met. “T did not answer your letter, Helen, because | couldn’t make any answer to that letter. What I have to say, I couldn’t write clearly. I wanted to tell it to you.” Jim spoke tersely after rather a long wait. “I might not have come,” she said, AINSLEE’S with a flash of her former fire. “You said ‘No answer.’ ” “T trusted that you would—I had to risk that.” “You knew I would, for Ralph’s sake, you mean. How ungenerous of you to humiliate me through my love for my child—your child. It is bitter enough without your adding anything to it now.” She had not meant to utter re- proaches ; but his self-containment mad- dened her. She wanted to strike and wound through his control, that he might not continue to stand there and look at her so steadily. “It ought to be bitter for you to come back and offer yourself to me the way you have to-day,’ he _ replied quietly. — “Jim!” she burst forth. “Did you imagine I would ever forgive what you have done?” “T haven't asked you to forgive me.” “No! You'll consider your own pride—but mine = “T have no pride toward you, Helen. Except the pride of possession—which you seem to think you can take away from me! I shall never ask your par- don for my personal conduct; because you don’t make laws for me. I make my own. Grant—for the sake of argu- ment—that I am all you have charged me. where she can confer pardon upon the man who has taken her and made her his. To me, that is just the talk you hear in the theater. I can’t see it at all. It’s against nature.” For the moment Helen was almost too. astounded for anger or hurt. “You don’t intend—you never intend to ask my forgiveness ?” Jim did not answer; he only looked at her. Because she could not read his gaze, her own wavered. “That isn’t what you came here to talk to me about,” he said presently. “No—no, not that! It’s Ralph!’ she asserted vehemently. “It’s Ralph! I must hold tight to the thought of him I can’t see a woman in a position » or I shall not be able to go through - with this.” (C@ HOOK (C@