s," the wife answered
admiringly, and yet drearily. It made her feel humiliated that her man
could live this narrow life of one room without despair, with sufficient
resistance to the lure of her hundred and fifty thousand pounds and her
own delicate and charming person. Here, it would seem, he was content.
One easy-chair, made out of a barrel, a couch, a bed--a very narrow bed,
like a soldier's, a bed for himself alone--a small table, a shelf on the
wall with a dozen books, a little table, a bureau, and an old-fashioned,
sloping-topped, shallow desk covered with green baize, on high legs,
so that like a soldier too he could stand as he wrote (Crozier had made
that high stand for the desk himself). That was what the room conveyed
to her--the spirit of the soldier, bare, clean, strong, sparse: a
workshop and a chamber of sleep in one, like the tent of an officer on
the march. After the feeling had come to her, to heighten the sensation
she espied a little card hung under the small mirror on the wall. There
was writing on it, and going nearer, she saw in red pencil the words,
"Courage, soldier!"

These were the words which Kitty was so fond of using, and the girl had
a thrill of triumph now as she saw the woman from whom Crozier had fled
looking at the card. She herself had come and looked at it many times
since Crozier had gone, for he had only put it there just before he left
on his last expedition to Aspen Vale to carry through his deal. It had
brought a great joy to Kitty's heart. It had made her feel that she had
some share in his life; that, in a way, she had helped him on the march,
the vivandiere who carried the water-bag which would give him drink when
parched, battle-worn, or wounded.

Mona Crozier turned away from the card, sadly reflecting that nothing in
the room recalled herself; that she was not here in the very core of his
life in even the smallest way. Yet this girl, this sunny creature
with the call of youth and passion in her eyes, this Ruth of the
wheat-fields, came and went here as though she was a part of it. She did
this and that for him, and she was no doubt on such terms of intimacy
with him that they were really part of each other's life in a scheme of
domesticity unlike any boarding-house organization she had ever known.
Here in everything there was the air, the decorum, and the unartificial
comfort of home.

This was why he could live without his wedded wife and her gold and her
brocade, and