Minnie was living in Chicago now—­a good-natured creature, but slack, like her mother.  Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and crying down with the rich.  They had two children.  Minnie wrote of them, and of the delights of city life.  Movies every night.  Halsted Street just around the corner.  The big stores.  State Street.  The L took you downtown in no time.  Something going on all the while.  Bella Westerveld, after one of those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a terrible termagant.

* * * * *

When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn’t dream that a world would be clamouring for hogs and wheat for four long years.  When the time came he had them, and sold them fabulously.  But wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike with seven other farm boys from the district left for the nearest training camp that was to fit them for France and war.

Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics.  Old Ben took it like a stoic.  He drove the boy to town that day.  When the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue shirt.  But that was all.  As the weeks went on the quick, light step began to lag a little.

He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone.  There were no farm helpers to be had.  Old Ben couldn’t do it all.  A touch of rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks.  Bella’s voice seemed never to stop its plaint.

“There ain’t no sense in you trying to make out alone.  Next thing you’ll die on me, and then I’ll have the whole shebang on my hands.”  At that he eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove.  His resistance was wearing down.  He knew it.  He wasn’t dying.  He knew that, too.  But something in him was.  Something that had resisted her all these years.  Something that had made him master and superior in spite of everything.

* * * * *

In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma Byers came to him often.  She had left that district twenty-eight years ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and was prosperous.  He wasted no time in idle regrets.  He had been a fool, and he paid the price of fools.  Bella, slamming noisily about the room, never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third person—­a sturdy girl of twenty-two or three, very wholesome to look at, and with honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow.

“It’ll get worse an’ worse all the time,” Bella’s whine went on.  “Everybody says the war’ll last prob’ly for years an’ years.  You can’t make out alone.  Everything’s goin’ to rack and ruin.  You could rent out the farm for a year, on trial.  The Burdickers’d take it and glad.  They got those three strappin’ louts that’s all flat-footed or slab-sided or cross-eyed or somethin’, and no good for the army.  Let them run it on shares.  Maybe they’ll even buy, if things turn out.  Maybe Dike’ll never come b—­”