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Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him.  She hated farm life.  She was contemptuous of farmer folk.  She loathed cooking and drudgery.  The Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs. Huckins was always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pig’s feet and shredding cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunch counter downstairs.  Bella had early made up her mind that there should be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life.  Whenever she could find an excuse, she loitered about the saloon.  There she found life and talk and colour.  Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or with an armful of clean towels.

Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself:  “I want to marry Bella.”  He never dared meet the thought.  He intended honestly to marry Emma Byers.  But this thing was too strong for him.  As for Bella, she laughed at him, but she was scared, too.  They both fought the thing, she selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm eyes and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart.  Ben’s appeal for Bella was merely that of the magnetic male.  She never once thought of his finer qualities.  Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluring woman.  But in the end they married.  The neighbourhood was rocked with surprise.  In fact, the only unsurprised party to the transaction was the dame known as Nature.  She has a way of playing these tricks on men and women for the furtherance of her own selfish ends.

Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colours of pretence in order to attract a mate.  But Ben Westerveld had been too honest to be anything but himself.  He was so honest and fundamentally truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married.  He had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing was a ceremony and in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult.  He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blonde hair swept away in a clean line from her forehead.  For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitues of Old Red Front Huckins’s bar.

They had three children, a girl and two boys.  Ben Westerveld prospered in spite of his wife.  As the years went on he added eighty acres here, eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the Mississippi.  There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he was too expert a farmer to fail.  At threshing time the crew looked forward to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, his wife.  She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the county.  And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her plaint was the same:  “If I’d thought I was going to stick down on a farm all my life, slavin’ for a pack of men folks day and night, I’d rather have died.  Might as well be dead as rottin’ here.”