"We got to make up over that bench yet," she said at last; and we rode
out past the ideal stable--its natty weather vane forever pointing the
wind to the profit of no man--through another gate of superb cunning,
and so once more to an understandable landscape, where sane cattle
grazed. Here I threw off the depression that comes upon one in places
where our humankind so plainly have been and are not. Again I questioned
of Broadmoor and its vanished people.
The immediate results were fragmentary, serving to pique rather than
satisfy; a series of _hors d'oeuvres_ that I began to suspect must form
the whole repast. On the verge of coherence the woman would break off to
gloat over a herd of thoroughbred Durhams or a bunch of sportive
Hereford calves or a field teeming with the prized fruits of
intermarriage between these breeds. Or she found diversion in stupendous
stacks of last summer's hay, well fenced from pillage; or grounds for
criticising the sloth of certain of her henchmen, who had been told as
plain as anything that "that there line fance" had to be finished by
Saturday; no two ways about it! She repeated the language in which she
had conveyed this decision.
Pages:
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337