Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling.  The boy was crop-wise, as his father had been at his age.  On Sundays you might see the two walking about the farm looking at the pigs—­great black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eying the stock; speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April with rich patches that were almost black.  Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was a fine prospect.  Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy’s opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show.  Here, at last, was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and bitter disappointment of his married life.

That married life had endured now for more than thirty years.  Ben Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step—­for his years.  The stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken.  He was as neat and clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five—­a habit that requires much personal courage on a farm and that is fraught with difficulties.  The community knew and respected him.  He was a man of standing.  When he drove into town on a bright winter morning and entered the First National Bank in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and his great boots, even Shumway, the cashier, would look up from his desk to say:  “Hello, Westerveld!  Hello!  Well, how goes it?”

When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there were no unpaid notes to his discredit.

All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the work of his hands.  Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos.  All these things were dependent on him for their future well-being—­on him and on Dike after him.  His days were full and running over.  Much of the work was drudgery; most of it was back-breaking and laborious.  But it was his place.  It was his reason for being.  And he felt that the reason was good, though he never put that thought into words, mental or spoken.  He only knew that he was part of the great scheme of things and that he was functioning ably.  If he had expressed himself at all, he might have said: 

“Well, I got my work cut out for me, an’ I do it an’ do it right.”

There was a tractor now, of course; a phonograph with expensive records, so that Caruso and McCormack and Elman were household words; a sturdy, middle-class automobile, in which Bella lolled red-faced in a lacy and beribboned boudoir cap when they drove into town.  On a Saturday afternoon you saw more boudoir caps skimming up and down the main street in Commercial than you might see in a century of French farces.

As Ben Westerveld had prospered his shrewish wife had reaped her benefits.  Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment.  He had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an ice house, a commodious porch, a washing machine, even a crude bathroom.  But Bella remained unplacated.  Her face was set toward the city.  And slowly, surely, the effect of thirty-odd years of nagging was beginning to tell on Ben Westerveld.  He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the coarser.  She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold.