Then she was silent and refused to respond readily to Ann's advances, but rode looking at her pony's ears, her lips in a straight line.
That was the beginning. Each day the two women rode together, Nora teaching Ann all she knew of horses and showing her, in her own way, the mighty beauty of that country.
After the first time, they said little about Bruce; with a better acquaintance, more matters could be talked about and for that each was thankful.
Removed as they were from one another by birth and training, each of these two women, strangers until within a few days, found that a great part of her life was identical with that of the other. Yet, at the very point where they came closest to one another, divergence began again. Their common interest was their feeling for Bruce Bayard, and their greatest difference was the manner in which each reacted to the emotion. The waitress, more elemental, more direct and child-like, wanted the man with an unequivocal desire. She would have gone through any ordeal, subjected herself to any ignominious circumstances, for his pleasure. But she did not want him as a possession, as something which belonged to her; she wanted him for a master, longed with every fiber of her sensory system to belong to him. She would have slaved for him, drudged for him, received any brutal outburst he might have turned on her, gratefully, just so long as she knew she was his.
Ann Lytton, complicated in her manner of thought by the life she had lived, hampered by conventions, by preconceived standards of conduct, would not let herself be whiffed about so wholly by emotion. It was as though she braced backward and moved reluctantly before a high wind, urged to flight, resisting the tugging by all the strength of her limbs, yet losing control with every reluctant step. For her, also, Bruce Bayard was the most wonderful human being that she had ever experienced. His roughness, his little uncouth touches, did not jar on her highly sensitized appreciation of proprieties. With another individual of a weaker or less cleanly type, the slips in grammar, even, would have been annoying; but his virility and his unsmirched manner of thought, his robust, clean body, overbalanced those shortcomings and, deep in her heart, she idolized him. And yet she would not go further, would not willingly let that emotion come into the light where it could thrive and grow with the days; she tried to repress it, keeping it from its natural sources of nourishment and thereby its growth--for it would grow in spite of her--became a disrupting progress. One part of her, the real, natural, unhampered Ann, told her that for his embraces, for his companionship, she would sell her chances of eternity; she had no desire to own him, no urge to subject herself to him; the status she wanted was equal footing, a shoulder-to-shoulder relationship that would be a joyous thing. And yet that other part, that Puritanical Ann, resisted, fought down this urge, told her that she must not, could not want Bayard because, at the Circle A ranch, waited another man who, in the eyes of the law, of other people, of her God, even, was the one who owned her loyalty and devotion even though he could not claim her love. Strange the ways of women who will guard so zealously their bodies but who will struggle against every natural, holy influence to give so recklessly, so uselessly, so hopelessly, of their souls!