"It lacks just a few months of being twenty-eight years," she
added.

"Yes, it sounds like a long time when you put it that way, but it
doesn't seem any longer than a short sigh to me lying here. I've
been thinking, Rose, how you've always got it over to me that you
loved me or could love me--"

"I've always loved you, Martin--deeply."

"Yes, that's what's always made me so hard with you. It would
have been far better for you if you hadn't cared for me at all.
I've never loved anybody, not even my own mother, nor Bill, nor
myself for that matter." Their eyes shifted away from each other
quickly as both thought of one other whom he did not mention. "I
wasn't made that way, Rose. Now you could love anything--lots of
women are like that, and men, too. But I wasn't. Life to me has
always been a strange world that I never got over thinking about
and trying to understand, and at the same time hustling to get
through with every day of it as fast as I could by keeping at the
only thing I knew which would make it all more bearable. There's
a lot of pain in work, but it's only of the muscles and my pain
has always been in the things I've thought about. The awful waste
and futility of it all! Take this farm--I came here when this was
hardly more than a desert. You ought to have seen how thick the
dust was the first day we got down here. And I've built up this
place. You've helped me. Bill didn't care for it--even if he had
lived, he'd never have stayed here. But you do, in spite of all
that's happened."