Besides, nearly all our goods are Eastern goods.

That's about the only place they make goods, seems like." "As for that woman, I consider her little better than a harlot," her father said. Most of the citizens of Austin looked up to George Forsythe; they had voted him mayor twice; but Inez Scull looked down on him, as she would on any tradesman, and she was quick to let him know it.

"Just hold off on the Philadelphia plates," her father told her, at the height of his fit, just before he walked out. "Plain plates and plain cutlery will serve around here just fine." The point of the brown stoneware, as Clara meant to tell him once he cooled down, was that it .was plain; and yet it was satisfying to look at and solid besides. Clara loved the look and feel of it; she believed her father to be wrong, in this instance.

After all, she had been working with him in the store for a decade; she felt she ought to have a right to order a little nice crockery now and then, if she took the notion. If Inez Scull happened to like it she would buy all of it anyway; Inez Scull always bought all of anything she liked, whether it was a swatch of pretty cloth or two new sidesaddles that happened to appeal to her.

George Forsythe, seeing her shaky old butler loaded down with two new sidesaddles, could not resist asking why she needed two.

"Why, one for Sunday, of course," Inez said, with a flounce. "I can't be seen in the same old saddle seven days a week." "But those two are just alike," George pointed out.

"Nonetheless, one is for Sunday--I doubt you'd understand, sir," Inez said, as she swept out of the store.

Clara loved the look and feel of the new stoneware and felt sure her father was wrong in assuming that it wouldn't appeal to local tastes.

After all, Austin was no longer just a frontier outpost, as it had been when her father and mother opened the store. There were respectable women in Austin now, even educated women, and they weren't all as high-handed as Inez Scull. Clara herself didn't care for either Scull--the famous Captain had twice taken advantage of her father's absence to attempt to be familiar with her, once even trying to look down her bodice on a hot day when she had worn a loose dress.

On that occasion Clara slapped him smartly--she considered that she had tolerated quite enough, famous man or not--but the Captain had merely bowed to her and bought himself a speckled cravat. But, like it or not, the Sculls were too wealthy to throw out entirely--had it not been for their profligate spending, her father might, at times when drought dried up the farms and sapped the resources of the local livestock men, have had to worry seriously about the bankruptcy he accused Clara of bringing upon him.

His fits, though, Clara knew, weren't really about the store, or the ordering, or the Eastern crockery; they were about the fact that she was unmarried, and getting no younger. Suitor after suitor had failed to measure up; her twenties were flying past, and yet, there she was, still on her father's hands. She ought, in his view, to have long since become a well-established wife, with a hardworking husband to support her.

Many hardworking men, solid citizens, well able to support a wife, had sat in the Forsythe parlor and made their proposals. All were refused. Some licked their wounds for a few years and came back with new proposals, only to have those rejected too. After two tries and two failures most of the local men gave up and took wives who were less exacting; only Augustus McCrae, and a man named Bob Allen, a rancher who wished to venture up to Nebraska and trade in horses, persisted year after year. In his own mind and everyone else's, Gus McCrae, the proud Texas Ranger, seemed to have the inside track; yet in Clara's mind, though she dearly loved Gus McCrae, the issues were not so clear, nor the resolution so simple.

Still, her father could not be blamed too much for worrying that she might never find--or at least might never accept--a decent mate. Her mother, so sickly that she rarely ventured downstairs, worried too, but said little. The thing they all knew was that there was hardly another respectable young woman in Austin who, at Clara's age, was still unmarried.

In fact, one of the few women Clara's age who .was still single was Maggie Tilton, the young woman who was walking slowly and a little forlornly across the dusty street toward the store. Maggie, though, could not be included in the Forsythes' reckoning, because she was not one of the respectable young women of Austin. Inez Scull might behave like a harlot, while enjoying the prestige and position of being the Captain's wife, but Maggie Tilton .was a harlot. She had survived some rough years in the tents and shacks of Austin, moved to San Antonio for a bit, and then came back to Austin. She had tried to rise but failed and had come back to be where Woodrow Call was --or at least where he was quartered when the rangers were not in the field.

Clara watched, with interest, as Maggie came up the steps and hesitated a moment, as she looked at herself in the glass window; it was as if she had to reassure herself that she looked respectable enough to enter a regular store--Maggie always stopped and looked at herself before she would venture in to buy a ribbon, or a powder for headaches, or any little article of adornment.

In Clara's view Maggie looked plenty respectable. Her clothes were simple but clean, and she was always neat to a fault, as well as being modestly dressed. Madame Scull, for one, could scarcely be bothered to conceal her ample bosom--even Clara's own father, George Forsythe, the former mayor, had trouble keeping his eyes off Inez Scull's bosom, when it was rolling like the tide practically under his nose.

Maggie, though, was always proper to a fault; there was nothing flashy about her appearance. And yet she did what she did with men, with only the sadness in her eyes to tell of it, though that sadness told of it eloquently, at least to Clara. Sometimes Clara wished she could talk to Maggie--she longed to shake her good and tell her to forget about that hardheaded Woodrow Call. In her view Maggie ought to marry some decent farmer, many of whom would have been only too pleased to have her, despite her past.

Sometimes, lying alone at night in her room above the hardware store, a room that had been hers since birth, to which, so far, she had been reluctant to admit any man--though Gus McCrae had impulsively crowded into it once or twice--Clara thought of Maggie Tilton, in her poor room down the hill. She tried, once or twice, in her restlessness, to imagine that she and Maggie had traded places; that she was what Maggie was, a whore, available to any man who paid the money. But Clara would never make the imagining work, not quite. She could picture herself down the hill, in a shack or a tent, but when it came to the business with men she was not able to picture it, not really. Though fervent in her kissing with Gus McCrae--fervent and even bold, riding alone with him into the country, to swim at a particular spring--she still stopped short, well short, of what Maggie Tilton did regularly, for money, in order to survive.