Page:Spider Boy (1928).pdf/181

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

land school who had suffered several unfortunate experiences of the heart. One affair in particular had left her avowedly bereft of future desire for the companionship of man—at least the white man. Her compensation had been the discovery of the Indian, an entirely fortuitous revelation made to her during a casual visit to the Southwest. The Indian had proved so entirely satisfactory that she had disposed of her old home at Stockbridge in the Berkshires, furnished with pine in accordance with the best local traditions, and removed permanently to Santa Fe where, within a surprisingly short time, she had built up and decorated a new home that seemingly had succeeded in obliterating all memory of her unhappy past.

The red man, apparently, had immediately rewarded her. If he did not greet her approach with enthusiasm, at any rate he did not attempt to run away. Gradually then, this interest in, and an ensuing sentimentalized rationalization of, individuals broadened so that it embraced whole tribes and eventually the race itself. Marna Frost enthusiastically devoted herself to the cause, visiting Washington to beard the legislature on behalf of her protégés, lecturing at large and sending forth from her pink house quantities of pamphlets of a propagandist nature. So ardent