The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Book Club: Discuss/find out about a Classic Tale Set in Wyoming: The Virginian
Front-Ranger:
And the Occidental Hotel:
Front-Ranger:
From page 102, one of my personal favorite passages:
"When he was absent from her, and she could sit in her cabin and look at Grandmother Stark, and read home letters, then in imagination she felt it easy to play the part of guide and superior and indulgent companion. But when he was by her side, that part became a difficult one. Her woman's fortress was shaken by a force unknown to her before. [Other men] did not have it in them to look as this man could look, when the cold lustre of his eyes grew hot with internal fire. What color they were baffled her still. 'Can they possibly change?' she wondered. It seemed to her like sometimes when she had been looking from a rock straight down into clear sea water, this same color had lurked in its depths. 'Is it green or is it grey?' she asked herself, but did not turn just now to see. She kept her face toward the landscape."
Front-Ranger:
I'm ready to delve into Chapter 27 now. Where is everyone else in your reading??
Meryl:
I'm in the middle of Chapter 26, progressing slowly. :P
Front-Ranger:
After several chapters devoted to the shenanigans of that trash Trampas, who slunk off one day with the gullible cowboy Shorty, an action-filled chapter occurs. Chapter 27 "Grandmother Stark" opens with the schoolteacher, Molly Wood, packing up to go back home to Bennington, Vermont, giving in to her family and friends' warnings not to associate with wild men like that "rustler" The Virginian. She goes for one last ride on the horse that TV has gentled for her. She comes upon Monte, his horse, all wrung-out, and then upon the man himself, severely wounded. It is quite an ordeal getting him back to her cabin, where she puts him to bed amongst all the packing boxes.
While nursing him back to health, they read Browning together, which is their Pentecost. She reads to him a passage about two lovers:
--- Quote ---Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim--
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.
--- End quote ---
She doesn't know how to interpret this passage, but he says that the man would return "afteh he had played some more of the game...Life, ma'am. Whatever he was a-doin in the world of men. That's a bed-rock piece ma'am!"
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