It was a mistake -- a very big mistake . Tannis understood something of piano playing , something less of grammar and Latin , and something less still of social prevarications . But she understood absolutely nothing of flirtation . You can never get an Indian to see the sense of Platonics . Carey found the Flats quite tolerable after the homecoming of Tannis . He soon fell into the habit of dropping into the Dumont house to spend the evening , talking with Tannis in the parlor -- which apartment was amazingly well done for a place like the Flats -- Tannis had not studied Prince Albert parlors four years for nothing -- or playing violin and piano duets with her . When music and conversation palled , they went for long gallops over the prairies together . Tannis rode to perfection , and managed her bad-tempered brute of a pony with a skill and grace that made Carey applaud her . She was glorious on horseback . Sometimes he grew tired of the prairies and then he and Tannis paddled themselves over the river in Nitchie Joe 's dug-out , and landed on the old trail that struck straight into the wooded belt of the Saskatchewan valley , leading north to trading posts on the frontier of civilization . There they rambled under huge pines , hoary with the age of centuries , and Carey talked to Tannis about England and quoted poetry to her . Tannis liked poetry ; she had studied it at school , and understood it fairly well . But once she told Carey that she thought it a long , round-about way of saying what you could say just as well in about a dozen plain words . Carey laughed . He liked to evoke those little speeches of hers . They sounded very clever , dropping from such arched , ripely-tinted lips . If you had told Carey that he was playing with fire he would have laughed at you . In the first place he was not in the slightest degree in love with Tannis -- he merely admired and liked her . In the second place , it never occurred to him that Tannis might be in love with him . Why , he had never attempted any love-making with her !
And , above all , he was obsessed XXXXX that aforesaid fatal idea that Tannis was like the women he had associated with all his life , in reality as well as in appearance .
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