On her side she accepted everything unquestionably:  the shabby little ranch house that smelled of wood smoke, and tobacco smoke, and dogs; the easy scorn of her old friends on her husband’s part that so soon alienated her from them; the drink that she quickly learned to regard with uneasiness and distrust.  It was not that Jerry ever got really intoxicated, but he got ugly, excitable, irritable, even though quite in control of his actions and his senses.

Clara was a good cook, although not as expert as her fond mother’s little substitutions and innocent manipulations during their engagement had led Gerald to believe.  But she loved to please him, and when flushed and triumphant she put down some especially tempting dish before him, and felt his arm about her, tears of actual joy would stand in her bright eyes.  They had some happy days, some happy hours, in the first newness of being together.

Gerald’s man, Thomas, was an early cause of annoyance to Clara.  She would not have objected to cooking for a farm “hand”; that was a matter of course with all good farmers’ wives.  But Thomas was more British, in all that makes the British objectionable, than his master, and Thomas was quite decidedly addicted to drink.  He never thought of wiping a dish, or bringing Clara in a bucket of water from the well.  He ate what she set out upon the kitchen table for him, three times a day, chatting pleasantly enough of the farm, the horses, chickens, and vegetable garden, if Clara was in an amiable mood, but if, busy at the sink, or clearing the dining-room table, she was inwardly fuming with resentment at his very existence, Thomas could be silent, too, and would presently saunter away, stuffing his pipe, without even the common courtesy of piling his dishes together for her washing.  Thomas held long conversations with his master as they idled about the place; Clara would hear their laughter.  The manservant slept in a small shed detached from the main house, and there were times when he did not appear in the morning.  At such times Gerald with a pot of strong coffee likewise disappeared into the cabin.

“Pore old rotter!” the husband would say generously.  “He’s a decentish sort, don’t you know?  I meanter say, poor old Thomas did me an awfully good turn once—­and that!”

Clara inferred from various hints that Gerald had once been in the English army, and had met Thomas, and befriended him, or been befriended by him, at that period of his existence.  But, greatly to the little bride’s disappointment, Gerald never spoke of his old home or his connections there.  Clara had to draw what comfort she could from his intimation that all his relatives were unbelievably eminent and distinguished, the least of them superior in brain and achievement to any American who ever drew the breath of life.

And presently she forgot Thomas, forgot the petty annoyance of cooking and summer heat and dogs and physical discomfort, in the overwhelming prayer that the coming child, about whose advent Gerald, at first annoyed, had later been so generously good-natured, might prove a boy.  Gerald, living uncomplainingly in this dreadful little country town, enduring Western conditions with such dignity, and loving his little wife despite her undertaker father, would be seriously disgusted, she knew, if she gave him a daughter.