She did not acknowledge to herself that she also could not face the admission of failure to carry out what she had begun.
She had told her dad that she wanted to fight with him, even though "fighting" in this case meant washing the coarse clothing of her father and Frank, scrubbing the rough, warped boards of the cabin floor, and frying ranch-cured bacon for every meal, and in making butter to sell, and counting the eggs every night and being careful to use only the cracked ones for cooking.
She hated every detail of this crude housekeeping, from the chipped enamel dishpan to the broom that was all one-sided, and the pillow slips which were nothing more nor less than sugar sacks.

She hated it even more than she had hated the Casa Grande and her mother's frowsy mentality.

But because she could see that she made life a little more comfortable for her dad, because she felt that he needed her, she would stay and assure herself over and over that she was staying merely because she was too proud to go back to the old life and own the West a failure.
She was sweeping the doorstep with the one-sided broom when Brit drove out through the gate and up the trail which she knew led eventually to Sugar Spring.

The horses, sleek in their new hair and skittish with the change from hay to new grass, danced over the rough ground so that the running gear of the wagon, with its looped log-chain, which would later do duty as a brake on the long grade down from timber line on the side of Spirit Canyon, rattled and banged over the rocks with a clatter that could be heard for half a mile.

Lorraine looked after her father enviously.