"You have the hope of youth, Lance, to make this venture when all looks
black--and it pleases me," she said. "Sometimes I fancy that men had
braver hearts than they have now, when I was young."
Winston flushed a trifle, and stretching out an arm swept his hand
round the horizon. "All that looked dead a very little while ago, and
now you can see the creeping greenness in the sod," he said. "The lean
years cannot last forever, and, even if one is beaten again, there is a
consolation in knowing that one has made a struggle. Now, I am quite
aware that you are fancying a speech of this kind does not come well
from me."
Maud Barrington had seen his gesture, and something in the thought that
impelled it, as well as the almost statuesque pose of his thinly-clad
figure, appealed to her. Courthorne as farmer, with the damp of clean
effort on his forehead and the stain of the good soil that would
faithfully repay it on his garments, had very little in common with the
profligate and gambler. Vaguely she wondered whether he was not
working out his own redemption by every wheat furrow torn from the
virgin prairie, and then again the doubt crept in. Could this man have
ever found pleasure in the mire?
"You will plow your holding, Lance?" asked the elder lady, who had not
answered his last speech yet, but meant to later.
"Yes," said the man. "All I can. It's a big venture, and, if it
fails, will cripple me, but I seem to feel, apart from any reason I can
discern, that wheat is going up again, and I must go through with this
plowing.
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