almost a stranger to me, as though I’d got to be a sort of accident in your life. Remember, Honey-Chile, I’m not blaming you; I’m only pointing out certain obvious truths, now the time for a little honest talk seems to have cropped up. You were up to your ears in a fight, in a tremendously big fight, for success and money; and you were doing it more for me and Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee than for yourself. You couldn’t help remembering that I’d been a city girl and imagining that prairie-life was a sort of penance I was undergoing before passing on to the joys of paradise in an apartment-hotel with a mail-chute outside the door and the sound of the Elevated outside the windows. And you were terribly wrong in all that, for there have been days and days, Dinky-Dunk, when I’ve been homesick for that old slabsided ranch-shack and the glory of seeing you come in ruddy and hungry and happy for the ham and eggs and bread I’d cooked with my own hands. It seemed to bring us so gloriously close together. It seemed so homy and happy-go-lucky and soul-satisfying in its completeness, and we weren’t forever fretting about bank-balances and taxes and over-drafts. I was just a rancher’s wife then—and I can’t help feeling that all along there was something in that simple life we didn’t value enough. We were just rubes and hicks and clodhoppers and hay-tossers in those days, and we weren’t staying awake nights worrying about land-speculations and water-fronts and trying to make ourselves millionaires when we might have been making ourselves more at peace with our own souls. And now that our card-house of high finance has gone to smash, I realize more than ever that I’ve got to be at peace with my own soul and on speaking terms with my own husband. And if this strikes you as an exceptionally long-winded sermon, my beloved, it’s merely to make plain to you that I haven’t surrendered to any sudden wave of emotionalism when I talk about migrating over to that Harris Ranch. It’s nothing more than good old hard-headed, practical self-preservation, for I wouldn’t care to live without you, Dinky-Dunk, any more than I imagine you’d care to live without your own self-respect.”

I sat back, after what I suppose was the longest speech I ever made in my life, and studied my lord and master’s face. It was not an easy map to decipher, for man, after all, is a pretty complex animal and even in his more elemental moments is played upon by pretty complex forces. And if there was humility on that lean and rock-ribbed countenance of my soul-mate there was also antagonism, and mixed up with the antagonism was a sprinkling of startled wonder, and tangled up with the wonder was a slightly perplexed brand of contrition, and interwoven with that again was a suggestion of allegiance revived, as though he had forgotten that he possessed a wife who had a heart and mind of her own, who was even worth sticking to when the rest of the world was threatening to give him the cold shoulder. He felt abstractedly down in his coat pocket for his pipe, which is always a helpful sign.

“It’s big and fine of you, Chaddie, to put it that way,” he began, rather awkwardly, and with just a touch of color coming to his rather gray-looking cheek-bones. “But can’t you see that now it’s the children we’ve got to think of?”

“I have thought of them,” I quietly announced. As though any mother, on prairie or in metropolis, didn’t think of them first and last and in-between-whiles! “And that’s what simplifies the situation. I want them to have a fair chance. I’d rather they—”

“It’s not quite that criminal,” cut in Dinky-Dunk, with almost an angry flush creeping up toward his forehead.

“I’m only taking your own word for that,” I reminded him, deliberately steeling my heart against the tides of compassion that were trying to dissolve it. “And I’m only taking what is, after all, the easiest course out of the situation.”

Dinky-Dunk’s color receded, leaving his face even more than ever the color of old cheese, for all the tan of wind and sun which customarily tinted it, like afterglow on a stubbled hillside.

“But Lady Alicia herself still has something to say about all this,” he reminded me.

“Lady Alicia had better rope in her ranch when the roping is good,” I retorted, chilled a little by her repeated intrusion into the situation. For I had no intention of speaking of Lady Alicia Newland with bated breath, just because she had a title. I’d scratched dances with a duke or two myself, in my time, even though I could already see myself once more wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch.

“You’re missing the point,” began Dinky-Dunk.

“Listen!” I suddenly commanded. A harried roebuck has nothing on a young mother for acuteness of hearing. And thin and faint, from above-stairs, I caught the sound of a treble wailing which was promptly augmented into a duet.

“Poppsy’s got Pee-Wee awake,” I announced as I rose from my chair. It seemed something suddenly remote and small, this losing of a fortune, before the more imminent problem of getting a pair of crying babies safely to sleep. I realized that as I ran upstairs and started the swing-box penduluming back and forth. I even found myself much calmer in spirit by the time I’d crooned and soothed the Twins off again. And I was smiling a little, I think, as I went down to my poor old Dinky-Dunk, for he held out a hand and barred my way as I rounded the table to resume my seat opposite him.

“You don’t despise me, do you?” he demanded, holding me by the sleeve and studying me with a slightly mystified eye. It was an eye as wistful as an old hound’s in winter, an eye with a hunger I’d not seen there this many a day.

“Despise you, Acushla?” I echoed, with a catch in my throat, as my arms closed about him. And as he clung to me, with a forlorn sort of desperation, a soul-Chinook seemed to sweep up the cold fogs that had gathered and swung between us for so many months. I’d worried, in secret, about that fog. I’d tried to tell myself that it was the coming of the children that had made the difference, since a big strong man, naturally, had to take second place to those helpless little mites. But my Dinky-Dunk had a place in my heart which no snoozerette could fill and no infant could usurp. He was my man, my mate, my partner in this tangled adventure called life, and so long as I had him they could take the house with the laundry-chute and the last acre of land.

“My dear, my dear,” I tried to tell him, “I was never hungry for money. The one thing I’ve always been hungry for is love. What’d be the good of having a millionaire husband if he looked like a man in a hair-shirt on every occasion when you asked for a moment of his time? And what’s the good of life if you can’t crowd a little affection into it? I was just thinking we’re all terribly like children in a Maypole dance. We’re so impatient to get our colored bands wound neatly about a wooden stick, a wooden stick that can never be ours, that we make a mad race of what really ought to be a careless and leisurely joy. We don’t remember to enjoy the dancing, and we seem to get so mixed in our ends. So carpe diem, say I. And perhaps you remember that sentence from Epictetus you once wrote out on a slip of paper and pinned to my bedroom door: ‘Better it is that great souls should live in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great houses!’”

Dinky-Dunk, as I sat brushing back his top-knot, regarded me with a sad and slightly acidulated smile.