“Go ahead and finish your supper,” he cried.  “Having a wife with a car of her own is next thing to having no wife at all.  How they do like to roll around!  I’ve been mighty blamed careful to see that Susie never learned to drive a car.  See here, Claude, how soon do you figure you’ll be able to let me have the thrasher?  My wheat will begin to sprout in the shock pretty soon.  Do you reckon your father would be willing to work on Sunday, if I helped you, to let the machine off a day earlier?”

“I’m afraid not.  Mother wouldn’t like it.  We never have done that, even when we were crowded.”

“Well, I think I’ll go over and have a talk with your mother.  If she could look inside my wheat shocks, maybe I could convince her it’s pretty near a case of your neighbour’s ox falling into a pit on the Sabbath day.”

“That’s a good idea.  She’s always reasonable.”

Leonard rose.  “What’s the news?”

“The Germans have torpedoed an English passenger ship, the Arabic; coming this way, too.”

“That’s all right,” Leonard declared.  “Maybe Americans will stay at home now, and mind their own business.  I don’t care how they chew each other up over there, not a bit!  I’d as soon one got wiped off the map as another.”

“Your grandparents were English people, weren’t they?”

“That’s a long while ago.  Yes, my grandmother wore a cap and little white curls, and I tell Susie I wouldn’t mind if the baby turned out to have my grandmother’s skin.  She had the finest complexion I ever saw.”

As they stepped out of the back door, a troop of white chickens with red combs ran squawking toward them.  It was the hour at which the poultry was usually fed.  Leonard stopped to admire them.  “You’ve got a fine lot of hens.  I always did like white leghorns.  Where are all your roosters?”

“We’ve only got one.  He’s shut up in the coop.  The brood hens are setting.  Enid is going to try raising winter frys.”

“Only one rooster?  And may I ask what these hens do?”

Claude laughed.  “They lay eggs, just the same,—­better.  It’s the fertile eggs that spoil in warm weather.”

This information seemed to make Leonard angry.  “I never heard of such damned nonsense,” he blustered.  “I raise chickens on a natural basis, or I don’t raise ’em at all.”  He jumped into his car for fear he would say more.

When he got home his wife was lifting supper, and the baby sat near her in its buggy, playing with a rattle.  Dirty and sweaty as he was, Leonard picked up the clean baby and began to kiss it and smell it, rubbing his stubbly chin in the soft creases of its neck.  The little girl was beside herself with delight.

“Go and wash up for supper, Len,” Susie called from the stove.  He put down the baby and began splashing in the tin basin, talking with his eyes shut.

“Susie, I’m in an awful temper.  I can’t stand that damned wife of Claude’s!”