The result was a somewhat happy one, for in the Kid, as his comrades termed him, her fantasies and extravagances had been toned down by the very prosaic common sense of the Weston male line.

They were full-fleshed, hard-riding Englishmen who lived on beef and beer.
Though Weston was naturally not aware of it, there were respects in which Ida Stirling was like his mother.

Ida, however, usually kept her deeper thoughts to herself, which Mrs.Weston had seldom done, but she shaped her life by them, and they were wholesome.
"Well," he said diffidently, "it was quite a humiliating situation for the old man.

He was a person of some consequence once--a rather famous assayer and mineralogist--and I think he felt it." "That is not what I asked you," said Ida, with a trace of dryness.
Weston spread out his hands as though to excuse himself.
"Then," he said, "they were all against him, and I think Jake--I mean the big chopper--would have forced the stuff down his throat.

It was horribly burnt.