“And only sixty-eight thousand! That’s a bargain!” Rachel had learned to think on Bunny’s imperial scale, since she had been racing over the state in his fast car, inspecting millionaire playgrounds and real estate promoters’ paradises.
“The price is not bad,” said Bunny, “if we are sure about the soil and water.”
“You could see the state of the growing things, before it got dark.”
“Maybe so. We’ll come back in the morning, and have a talk with the ranchman. Perhaps he’s a tenant, and will tell us the truth.” Not for nothing had Bunny spent his boyhood buying lands with his shrewd old father!
II
Twilight veiled this valley of new dreams, and across the way the hills were purple shadows. Bunny said, “There’s just one thing worrying me about our plan now: I’m afraid there’s going to be a scandal.”
“How do you mean?”
“You and me being together all the time, and going off and being missing at night.”
“Oh, Bunny, what nonsense!”
“No, really, I’m worried. I told Peter Nagle we’d have to conform to bourgeois standards, and we’re beginning wrong. My Aunt Emma is a bourgeois standard, and she would never approve of this, and neither would your mother. We ought to go and get married.”
“Oh, Bunny!” She was staring at him, but it was too dark to reveal any possible twinkle in his eyes. “Are you joking?”
“Rachel,” he said, “will you take that much trouble to preserve the good name of our institution?”
He came a step nearer, and she stammered, “Bunny, you don’t—you don’t mean that!”
“I don’t see any other way—really.”
“Bunny—no!”
“Why not?”
“Because—you don’t want to marry a Jewess!”
“Good Lord!”
“Don’t misunderstand me, I’m proud of my race. But all your friends would think it was a mistake.”
“My friends, Rachel? Who the devil are my friends—except in the radical movement? And where would the radical movement be without the Jews?”
“But, Bunny—your sister!”
“My sister is not my friend. Neither did she ask me to pick out her husband.”
Rachel stood, twisting her fingers together nervously. “Bunny, do you really—you aren’t just speaking on an impulse?”
“Well, I suppose it’s an impulse. I seem to have to blurt it out. But it’s an impulse I’ve had a good many times.”
“And you won’t be sorry?”
He laughed. “It depends upon your answer.”
“Stop joking, please—you frighten me. I can’t afford to let you make a mistake. It’s so dreadfully serious!”
“But why take it that way?”
“I can’t help it; you don’t know how a woman feels. I don’t want you to do something out of a generous impulse, and then you’d feel bound, and you wouldn’t be happy. You oughtn’t to marry a girl out of the sweatshops.”
“Good God, Rachel, my father was a mule-driver.”
“Yes, but you’re Anglo-Saxon; away back somewhere your ancestors were proud of themselves. You ought to marry a tall, fair woman that will stay beautiful all her life, and look right in a drawing-room. Jewish women bear two or three children, and then they get fat, and you wouldn’t like me.”
He burst out laughing. “I have attended the weddings of some of those tall, fair Anglo-Saxon women; and the priest pronounces, very solemnly, ‘Into this holy estate the two persons now present come now to be joined. If any man can show just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace.’ ”
“Bunny,” she pleaded, “I’m trying to face the facts!”
“Well, dear, if you must be solemn—it happens that I never loved a fair woman. The two I picked out to live with were dark, the same as you. It must be nature’s effort to mix things. I suppose you know about Vee Tracy?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Vee had the looks all right, and she’ll keep them—she makes a business of it. But you see, it didn’t do me any good, she threw me over for a Romanian prince.”
“Why, Bunny?”
“Because I wouldn’t give up the radical movement.”
“Oh, how I hated that woman!”
There was a note of melodrama in Rachel’s usually serene voice, and Bunny was curious. “You did hate her?”
“I could have choked her!”
“Because she struck you?”
“No! Because I knew she was trying to take you out of the movement; and I thought for sure she would. She had everything I didn’t have.”
Bunny was thinking—by golly, it was queer! Vee had known it—and he hadn’t! Oh, these women! Aloud he said, politely, “No, she didn’t have quite everything.”
“What is there that I have, Bunny? What do I mean to you?”
“I’ll tell you—I’m so tired of being quarreled with. You can’t have any idea—my whole life, since I began to think for myself, has been one wrangle with the people who loved me, or thought they had a right to direct me. You can’t imagine what a sense of peace I get when I think of being with you; it’s like settling down into nice soft cushions. I’ve hesitated about it, because of course I’m not very proud of the Vee Tracy episode, and I didn’t know if you’d take a man secondhand—or third-hand it really is, because there was a girl while I was in high school. I’m telling you my drawbacks, to balance your getting fat!”
“Bunny, I don’t care about the other women—they will always be after you, of course. I was heartsick about Miss Tracy, because I knew she was a selfish woman, and I was afraid you’d find it out too late, and be wrecked. At least, I told myself that was it—I suppose the truth is I was just green with jealousy.”
“Why, Rachel! You mean that you love me?”
“As if any woman could help loving you! The question is, do you love me?”
“I do—yes, truly!”
“But Bunny—” there was a little catch in her voice. “You don’t show it!”
So then he realized that he had been wasting a lot of time! He had to take only one more step, and put his arms about her, and there she was, sobbing on his shoulder, as if her heart would break. “Oh,
