This kind of foreigner he particularly loathed--the
slender, nervous type which suggested over-refinement to the point of
effeminacy. He had always hated slender, effeminate-looking men of the
native breed. This one was doubly offensive because he was an Italian.
How any woman with true womanly instincts could tolerate such a spider
was more than he could understand.
Jennie Barton had always frankly said that she admired men of his own
type. He was six feet one, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and weighed a hundred
and ninety-six pounds at twenty-one years of age. He had always felt
instinctively that he was exactly the man for Jennie's mate. She was
nineteen, dark and slender, a bundle of quick, sensitive, nervous
intelligence. Her brown eyes were almost black and her luxuriant hair
seemed raven-hued beside his. He had always imagined it nestling beside
his big blond head in perfect contentment since the first summer he had
spent with Tom Barton at their cottage at the White Sulphur Springs.
He had taken it for granted that she would say yes when he could screw
up his courage to speak. She had treated him as if he were already in
the family.
"Confound it," he muttered, clenching his big fist, "that's what worries
me! Maybe she just thinks of me as one of her brothers!"
It hadn't occurred to him until he saw the light kindle in her eyes at
the sight of that smooth-tongued reptilian foreigner.
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