change. Now I love you for the possibilities that I see in you. I
wouldn't think of marrying you as you are. It would be an insult to my
good blood. Your beauty is marred by your illness. You have
absolutely no sense of responsibility toward life. You think that life
owes everything to you, that you pay your way with your beauty. If you
didn't die, but married DeWitt, you would go on through life petted and
babied, bridge-playing and going out to lectures, childless,
incompetent, self-satisfied--and an utter failure!

"Now I think that humans owe everything to life and that women owe the
most of all because they make the race. The more nature has done for
them, the more they owe. I believe that you are a thousand times worth
saving. I am going to keep you out here in the desert until you wake
to your responsibility to yourself and to life. I am going to strip
your veneering of culture from you and make you see yourself as you are
and life as it is--life, big and clean and glorious, with its one big
tenet: keep body and soul right and reproduce your kind. I am going to
make you see bigger things in this big country than you ever dreamed
of."

He stopped and Rhoda sat appalled, the Indian watching her. To relieve
herself from his eyes Rhoda turned toward the desert. The sun had all
but touched the far horizon. Crimson and gold, purple and black,
desert and sky merged in one unspeakable glory. But Rhoda saw only
emptiness, only life's cruelty and futility and loneliness. And once
more she wrung her feeble hands.

Kut-le spoke to Molly, the fat squaw. She again brought Rhoda a cup of
broth. This time Rhoda drank it mechanically, then sat in abject
wretchedness awaiting the next move of her tormentor. She had not long