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Show 173 Other boys asked me to marry them, about twenty in all, but he had spoiled me for all of them. He visited me in Joseph the next summer. He called me from Parker's. "Will you go for a ride with me?" he asked. "Yes. I'll call Mary, " I said. The three of us had ridden often. "I didn't ask for Mary, " he said. "I want you to ride with me to the canyon. " We took lunches and talked all the way as we had always talked, an inexhaustible supply of words, much of it banter. Our letters had been much more communicative. Once, when I was in training, he had sent me a sprig of sage, a favorite odor of mine. My associates didn't appreciate it like I did, but in later years when I was given corsages of gardenias my sprig of sage was neither equalled nor topped. After we ate, under the sparse shade of some cottonwood trees, he stretched out and put his head in my lap. "I have had a letter from my grandmother, " he said. "She says I must come home. My mother is ill. " He watched my face for reaction, but alas for the discipline I had received in training. ("You may smile, but never laugh," the superintendent had once told Celia, hearing her laugh peal out when a patient had elevated his temperature by placing his thermometer in a cup of coffee. " A good nurse shows no emotion, " Miss Eagar reiterated. Your heart may break, but you must never weep.) "When do you leave?" I said lightly to Tommy. It would be immediately. |