'That proves you're a deceiving man, if you think that,' she said. 'You've had a long ride for nothing, I guess.'
'Why, no,' he said. 'It's happiness to see you.'
Clara felt a sudden irritation. 'Do you think you can have us both?' she said. 'My husband isn't dead. I haven't seen you in sixteen years. I've mostly raised children and horses during those years. Three of the children died, and plenty of the horses. It took all the romance out of me, if romance is what you were hoping for. I read about it in my magazines but I left it behind for myself when I left Austin.'
'Don't you regret it?' Augustus asked.
'Oh, well,' Clara said, 'yes and no. I'm too strong for the normal man and too jealous once my feelings get started. I'm surprised you dare bring another woman into my house.'
'I thought you liked her,' he said.
'I do like her,' Clara said. 'I mind you doing it, though. Don't you understand the facts of nature yet? She's younger and prettier.'
'It happened accidentally, like I mentioned,' Augustus said.
'I never noticed you having such accidents with ugly girls,' Clara said. 'I don't care how it happened. You've been my dream, Gus. I used to think about you two or three hours a day.'
'I wish you'd wrote, then,' he said.
'I didn't want you here,' she said. 'I needed the dreams. I knew you for a rake and a rambler but it was sweet to pretend you only loved me.'
'I do only love you, Clara,' he said. 'I've grown right fond of Lorie, but it ain't like this feeling I have for you.'
'Well, she loves you,' Clara said. 'It would destroy her if I was to have you. Don't you know that?'
'Yes, I know that,' Augustus said, thinking there would never again be such a woman as the one who looked at him with anger in her face.
'Would you destroy her, then, if I said stay?' Clara asked.
'I expect so,' Augustus said.
'That ain't an answer.'
'Yes, you know I would,' he said. 'I'd smother Bob for you and send Lorie to perdition.'
Clara sighed, and her anger wore out with the sigh.
'Such talk,' she said. 'Bob'll die when he can manage it, and I'll see what I can do for your bride. It's just her beauty that set me off. I was always the youngest and prettiest, and now I'm not.'
'You're mighty pretty, and anyway pretty ain't everything,' he said.
'Where men like you are concerned it's ninety-nine percent,' she said. 'You ain't had time to look at me close. I ain't the prettiest anymore. The prettiest is downstairs.'
'I'd still like a kiss,' he said.
A tickle of amusement took her. He saw her smile and took it for encouragement. When he bent forward the result was so bland that after a moment Clara drew back her head and laughed.
'You've ridden a long way for some pretty weak courting,' she said, but she felt better. Gus looked rather hangdog at his failure-one of the few times she had ever seen him look that way.
'You beat any woman I ever saw for taking the starch out of a man,' he said, a little perplexed. Despite all the complications, he felt his old love for her returning with its old power. So much feeling flooded him, just looking at her, that he felt shaky. It was a puzzle to him that such a thing could happen, for it was true she had become rather bony and her face had thinned too much, and certainly she was as taxing as a woman could be. And yet the feeling made him shaky.
'Think I'm rough, Gus?' she asked with a smile.
'I ain't been scorched by lightning, but I doubt it could be hotter than being scorched by you,' he said.
'Still think you'd have been up to being married to me?'
'I don't know,' he said truthfully.
Clara laughed and took his arm to lead him downstairs.
'What about the young sheriff?' he asked, stopping her. He was unwilling to end their privacy so soon.
'What sheriff?'
'Why, July Johnson,' he said. 'It seems you've adopted him.'
'I mainly wanted the baby, but I guess it's only fair to keep the father too,' she said.
'Keep him and do what with him?'
'What do you care?' Clara said. 'You're engaged. You can ride all over the country with a pretty girl, I guess I can be allowed a man. I'd forgotten how jealous you were. You were jealous of Jake and I did little more than flirt with Jake.'
'To hear him talk, you did,' Augustus said.
'Neither of us will hear him talk again,' Clara said. 'And I won't marry again.'
'What makes you so sure?'
'I don't have enough respect for men,' she said. 'I've found very few who are honest, and you ain't one of the few.'
'I'm about half honest,' Augustus said.
'That's right,' she said, and led him on downstairs.
To his surprise, Clara simply walked into the kitchen and invited Lorena to stay with them while the herd went on to Montana.
'We could use your help and you'd be more than welcome, she said. 'Montana's no place for a lady.'
Lorena blushed when she said it-no one had ever applied the word 'lady' to her before. She knew she didn't deserve it. She wasn't a lady like Clara. She had never even met a lady like Clara, and in the space of a day had come to admire her more than she had ever admired anyone excepting Gus. Clara had shown her nothing but courtesy and had made her welcome in her house, whereas other respectable women had always shunned her because of the way she lived.
Sitting in the kitchen with the girls and the baby, Lorena felt happy in a way that was new to her. It stirred in her distant memories of the days she had spent in her grandmother's house in Mobile when she was four. Her grandmother's house had been like Clara's-she had gone there only once that she could remember. Her grandmother had put her in a soft bed, the softest she had ever slept in, and sung songs to her while she went to sleep. It was her happiest memory, one she treasured so, that in her years of traveling she grew almost afraid to remember it-someday she might try to remember it and find it gone. She was very afraid of losing her one good, warm memory. If she lost that, she felt she might be too sad to go on.
But in Clara's house she wasn't afraid to remember her grandmother, and the softness of the bed. Clara's house was the kind of house she thought she might live in someday-at least she had hoped to when she was little. But when her parents sickened and died, she lost hope of living in such a house. Mosby's home had been nothing like it, and then she had started living in hotels or little rooms. She slowly stopped thinking of nice houses and the things that went with them, such as little girls and babies.
So when Clara came downstairs and asked her to stay, it felt like being given back something-something that had been lost so long that she had ceased to think about it. Just before Clara and Gus came in, the girls had been nagging her to teach them how to sew. Lorena could sew fairly well. The girls complained that their mother never took the time to teach them. Their mother, about whom they were full of gripes, was more interested in horses than in sewing.
The girls were not at all surprised when Clara asked Lorena to stay.
'Oh, do,' Sally said. 'We could learn to sew if you would.'
'We could sew new dresses, we never get any,' Betsey said.
Lorena looked at Gus. He seemed flustered, and he seldom was flustered. She thought he might be bothered by the thought of her staying.
'Would you come back, Gus?' she asked. It seemed all right to ask him in front of Clara and the girls. Clara, after issuing the invitation, had started making coffee.
Augustus saw that she wanted to stay. If asked that morning if such a thing could occur, he would have said it was impossible. Lorena had clung to him since the rescue. But being at Clara's, even for so short a space, had changed her. She had refused to go to Ogallala, and was frightened of the thought of going into a store, but she
