Giant by Edna Ferber Page B

their elders’ legs, and the men shifted the sleeping babies hanging limp on their shoulders. “Lookit,” they said. “Lookit the big lights up yonder…. I bet that’s the Governor coming inthere…. Stop that stompin’ around, Alvin. Come here, I say, afore I whup you.”
    “Biggest airport in the whole state of Texas. Texas hell! In the whole United States Hermoso’s the biggest. They say it makes anything they got in the East—New York or anywheres—look like a prairie-dog hole.”
    And in the deeper shadows stood the Hermosans of Mexican heritage, their darker faces almost indistinguishable in the gloom. These were quiet, the children did not run about with squawking catcalls; the boys and girls of sixteen, seventeen, sometimes stood with their arms about each other’s waists, but demurely, almost primly, with their parents’ eyes approvingly upon them. The roads beyond were choked with every kind of motorcar and in these, too, the people stood up and stared and wondered and applauded in their curious psychological consciousness, which was a mixture of childlike hope and provincial self-satisfaction.
    “They lease that piece I got up in Tom Green County and it don’t come in a duster I can be in there next year along with any of ’em, Jett Rink or any of ’em. All you need is one good break. What was he but a ranch hand, and not even a riding hand. Afoot. And now lookit!”
    Lookit indeed. The guests came in cars the size of hearses and these were not stuck in the common traffic. Each carried a magic card and whole streets and outlying roads were open only to them. The women had got their dresses in New York or at Neiman’s in Dallas or Opper-Schlink’s in Houston. Given three plumes, they could have been presented just as they stood at the Court of St. James’s. Their jewels were the blazing plaques and chains you see in a Fifth Avenue window outside of which a special policeman with a bulge on his hip is stationed on eight-hour duty. Slim, even chic, there still was lacking in these women an almost indefinable quality that was inherent in the women of the Eastern and Midwestern United States. Leslie Benedict thought she could define it. In the early days of her marriage she had tried to discuss it with her husband as she had been accustomed to talk with her father during her girlhood and young womanhood—freelyand gaily and intelligently, lunge and riposte, very exhilarating, adult to adult.
    “They lack confidence,” she had said in the tones of one who has made a discovery after long search. “That’s it. Unsure and sort of deferential. Like oriental women.”
    “What do you think they should be? Masculine?”
    “I was just speaking impersonally, darling. You know. Even their voices go up at the end of a declarative sentence, instead of down. It’s sort of touching, as though they weren’t sure you’d like what they’ve said and were willing to withdraw it. Like this. I asked that Mrs. Skaggs where she lived and she said, ‘Uvalde?’ with the rising inflection. It’s appealing but sort of maddening, too.”
    “Well, you know the old Texas saying. In Texas the cattle come first, then the men, then the horses and last the women.”
    Now, as they drove into the vast airfield and stopped at the floodlighted entrance, Leslie was thinking of these things without emotion, but almost clinically as she had learned she must if she would survive. Mindful of their two most distinguished guests in the crush and glare and clamor of the entrance, they had somehow lost the South American. “It’s all right,” Bick said. “We’ll pick him up inside. And we’re all at the same table.”
    “Oh, Bick!” Leslie called through the roar and din. “Did you give him his card, I think it would have been better to give everyone a card just in case they were lost—oh, there he is in the doorway. Why—what——!”
    The olive-skinned aquiline face, the slim and elegant figure in full evening dress,