Edgar Rice Burroughs

“ And it’ll be fine for Eva—she loves you. She cried the other day—the last time you mentioned in earnest that you might not stay.”
“She’s a dear!”
“She is all of that,” he said. “We have always had our fights—I suppose all brothers and sisters do—and we kid one another a lot; but there never was a sister like Eva. Just let any one else say anything against me! They’d have a fight on their hands right there, if Eva was around. And sunshine! The old place seems like a morgue every time she goes away.”
“She worships you, Custer.” ”

“ I discovered it about the first time I talked with her alone; and then Eva asked me a question about something that she couldn’t have known about at all except through this girl. I didn’t know what to do. She was a girl, and so I couldn’t talk about her to any one, not even my father or mother; but I didn’t want her around Eva. I wondered if I was just a narrow prig, and if, after all, there was nothing that any one need take exception to in the girl. I got to analyzing the thing, and I came to the conclusion that I would be ashamed of mother and Eva if they talked or thought along such lines. ”

“ I was thinking, too, that we Penningtons demand a higher standard in women than is customary nowadays. We are a little old-fashioned, I guess. We want the blood of our horses and the minds of our women pure. Here is a case in point—I can tell you, because you don’t know the girl and never will. ”

“ He asked about the fire, and especially about the horses. He was delighted when she told him that a man had just come down to say that the fire was practically out, and the colonel was coming in shortly; and that the veterinary had been there and found the team not seriously injured.
“I think that fire was incendiary,” he said; “but now that Slick Allen is in jail, I don’t know who would set it.”
“Who is Slick Allen,” she asked, “and why should he want to set fire to Ganado?” ”