e laid
her hand upon a purse of delicate silver mesh hanging at her waist. "When
your eyes are opened you must go on, you cannot stop. There is no going
back. When you have read of all there is in the white man's world, when
you have seen, then there is no returning. You may end it all, if you
wish, in the snow, in the river, but there is no returning. The lodge of a
chief--ah, if my father had heard you say that--!"

The Indian woman shifted heavily in her chair, then shrank away from the
look fixed on her. Once or twice she made as if she would speak, but sank
down in the great chair, helpless and dismayed.

"The lodge of a chief!" the girl continued, in a low, bitter voice. "What
is the lodge of a chief? A smoky fire, a pot, a bed of skins--_aih-yi_! If
the lodges of the Indians were millions, and I could be head of all, and
rule the land, yet would I rather be a white girl in the hut of her white
man, struggling for daily bread among the people who sweep the buffalo
out, but open up the land with the plough, and make a thousand live where
one lived before. It is peace you want, my mother, peace and solitude, in
which the soul goes to sleep. Your days of hope are over, and you want to
drowse by the fire. I want to see the white man's cities grow, and the
armies coming over the hill with the ploughs and the reapers and the
mowers, and the wheels and the belts and engines of the great factories,
and the white woman's life spreading everywhere; for I am a white man's
daughter. I can't be both Indian and white. I will not be like the sun
when the shadow cuts across it and the land grows dark. I will not be
half-breed. I will be white or I will be Indian; and I will be white,
white only. My heart is white, my tongue is white, I think, I feel, as
white people think and feel. What they wish, I wish; as they live, I live;
as white women dress, I dress."

She involuntarily drew up the dark-red skirt she wore, showing a white
petticoat and a pair of fine stockings on an ankle as shapely as she had
ever seen among all the white women she knew. She drew herself up with
pride, and her body had a grace and ease which the white woman's
convention had not cramped.

Yet, with all her protests, no one would have thought her English. She
might have been Spanish, or Italian, or Roumanian, or Slav, though nothing
of her Indian blood showed in purely Indian characteristics, and something
sparkled in her, gave a radiance to her face and