: Corduroy by Mitchell Ruth Comfort - Young women Fiction; California Fiction; Ranch life Fiction

@FreeBooksThu 08 Jun, 2023

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Ginger got herself promptly out of his arms. She wasn't in the least shocked or resentful but she was disconcertingly cool. "I don't want to marry--anybody, 'Rome," she said.

She considered him calmly. "Generally, yes," she said.

He enveloped her swiftly in a rough, breathtaking hug, and as swiftly let her go again. "All right; I can wait a while longer." He strode, spurs jingling, toward his horse.

Ginger called after him, hospitably: "Don't go now,'Rome! Stay for dinner. Look at Pedro--he's dead tired."

Ginger frowned, looking after him. She did like old 'Rome a lot. She liked everything about him except the way he treated his stock. Still, he was no worse than most of them. But she didn't want to marry him; she didn't want to marry anybody; she was much too busy and happy.

DEAN WOLCOTT sent a dignified and satisfying design for the bridge, and Ginger had it executed in rough stone brought down from the hills. When it was finished it was a sincere and lasting thing, and she never went over it too quickly to rest her eyes on the plate set into the rock which bore Aleck's name and the dates of his birth and death, and, beneath--"From his sister and his friend."

After a little time the letters had begun to come; long, fluent, vivid letters; realistic stories of the life he and Aleck had lived together. Ginger read them with laughter and with tears, and wrote short, shy answers on cheap stationery. Ordinarily, she would have used the official ranch paper, with the name at the top--"Dos Pozos, Virginia Vald?s McVeagh, sole proprietor," and a neat cut of a long-horned steer at one side and a bucking horse at the other--but she had a dim sense of what the other Mr. Wolcott's expression would be when he saw. Therefore, she used tablet paper and envelopes which did not quite match; sometimes she used the regular stamped envelopes. Her writing was unformed and uninteresting; she loathed composing letters and they sounded and looked as if she did. She had never cared about getting them, save Aleck's. The Los Angeles and San Francisco relatives wrote chiefly to ask if they might come and bring the children for a little visit with dear Virginia, and grateful bread-and-butter notes after they had gone home. She liked getting letters now, however; she found Dean Wolcott's many-sheeted ones the most enthralling reading she had ever done. He was steadily gaining weight and strength and poise again, he told her. In the early summer he began to talk about coming, and in July he announced that he would arrive at San Luis Obispo on the twenty-sixth.

Ginger sat a long time with this letter in her hand. Then she went to the telephone and called up her favorite aunt by long distance, in San Francisco, and asked if she might come up to her next day and do some shopping.

Her Aunt Fan was cordial and kind. She was really very fond of Ginger; fond enough to like having her with her for little visits but not quite fond enough to visit her on the ranch. Aunt Fan's idea of the country was a tiresome geographical division through which you passed on your way to a city. Besides, it was a place of beguiling cream and broilers and hot breadstuffs; a place where one invariably and weakly ate too much.

Now she said that Ginger was to come at once and they'd have a wonderful time together; she'd been meaning to send for her, anyway.

Ginger took the day train from San Luis Obispo and reached San Francisco in the evening; this, she knew, was an easier time for her aunt to meet her than in the morning. Aunt Fan had a taxi waiting and bundled her delightedly into it.

It was a one-piece thing in blue serge of ordinary quality, listlessly trimmed with black braid, and the neck line was just too low and a good deal too high.

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