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Current Events, however, came abruptly to an end; and presently
Bud's vagrant, half-formed desire for achievement merged into biting
recollections. Here was a love drama, three reels of it. At first Bud
watched it with only a vague, disquieting sense of familiarity. Then
abruptly he recalled too vividly the time and circumstance of his first
sight of the picture. It was in San Jose, at the Liberty. He and Marie
had been married two days, and were living in that glamorous world of
the honeymoon, so poignantly sweet, so marvelous--and so fleeting. He
had whispered that the girl looked like her, and she had leaned heavily
against his shoulder. In the dusk of lowered lights their hands had
groped and found each other, and clung.

The girl did look like Marie. When she turned her head with that little
tilt of the chin, when she smiled, she was like Marie. Bud leaned
forward, staring, his brows drawn together, breathing the short, quick
breaths of emotion focussed upon one object, excluding all else. Once,
when Frank moved his body a little in the next seat, Bud's hand went out
that way involuntarily. The touch of Frank's rough coat sleeve recalled
him brutally, so that he drew away with a wincing movement as though he
bad been hurt.

All those months in the desert; all those months of the slow journeying
northward; all the fought battles with memory, when he thought that he
had won--all gone for nothing, their slow anodyne serving but to sharpen
now the bite of merciless remembering. His hand shook upon his knee.
Small beads of moisture oozed out upon his forehead. He sat stunned
before the amazing revelation of how little time and distance had done
to heal his hurt.

He wanted Marie. He wanted her more than he had ever wanted her in
the old days, with a tenderness, an impulse to shield her from her own
weaknesses, her own mistakes. Then--in those old days--there had been
the glamor of mystery that is called romance. That was gone, worn away
by the close intimacies of matrimony. He knew her faults, he knew how
she looked when she was angry and petulant. He knew how little the real
Marie resembled the speciously amiable, altogether attractive Marie who
faced a smiling world when she went pleasuring. He knew, but--he wanted
her just the same. He wanted to tell her so many things about the
burros, and about the desert--things that would make her laugh, and
things that would make her blink back the tears. He was homesick