“It would,” I said, “but it might not happen.” My eyes strayed to the window, to where in the distance a little group of people walked beside a bay horse wearing a sweat rug, his head lowered, his tail swinging gently about his hocks.
“Might not happen?” exclaimed Hans Gelderhol. “Might not happen? What does this mean? Does it mean that you have lost your spark, does it mean that you are no longer the girl I remember, the blue-eyed girl with the blonde hair and the slight build, not strong enough and not wealthy enough for eventing, but who burned with ambition and spurned my offer of a job, of help, because she wanted to prove she could do it on her own? What do you mean, might not happen?”
“I’m not sure that I know myself,” I said, “but I do know that situations change, and people change, and ambitions change with them. I was determined to succeed, I wanted to show you I could do it, I wanted your admiration. I wanted success, too, and fame perhaps, and love, I wanted that most of all, but I didn’t know it, and it seems to me that until these things are within your grasp you can’t evaluate them, you don’t know their true worth until you get close enough and then you find out a lot of unexpected things, and oh, I’m not explaining this very well,” I told him, “but I’ve found something that might be more important than all of it. Look,” I leaned over the table and I pointed to the bay horse and even from so far away I caught a flash of purple tights and I saw that Henrietta had an arm around Legend’s neck and that her head was beside his head. “Do you see my horse,” I asked him, “and the people with him, just turning into the stabling?”
He nodded, squinting intently in the direction of my finger; he was a little short-sighted now, the golden boy of eventing.
“Well,” I said proudly, “that’s my family.”
Ticket to Ride (Eventing Trilogy Book 3) Page 15