atermelon red. She must be healthy. Dinky-Dunk says she's a find, that
she can drive a double-seeder as well as any man in the West, and that
by taking her for the season he gets the use of the ox-team as well. He
warned me not to ask her about her family, as only a few weeks ago her
father and younger brother were burned to death in their shack, a
hundred miles or so north of us.

_Tuesday the Twentieth_

Olga has been with us a week, and she still fascinates me. She is
installed in the annex, and seems calmly satisfied with her
surroundings. She brought everything she owns tied up in an oat-sack. I
have given her a few of my things, for which she seems dumbly grateful.
She seldom talks, and never laughs. But I am teaching her to say "yes"
instead of "yaw." She studies me with her limpid blue eyes, and if she
is silent she is never sullen. She hasn't the heavy forehead and jaw of
the Galician women and she hasn't the Asiatic cast of face that belongs
to the Russian peasant. And she has the finest mouthful of teeth I ever
saw in a human head--and she never used a toothbrush in her life! She is
only nineteen, but such a bosom, such limbs, such strength!

This is a great deal of talk about Olga, I'm afraid, but you must
remember that Olga is an event. I expected Olie would be keeled over by
her arrival, but they seem to regard each other with silent contempt. I
suppose that is because racially and physically they are of the same
type. I'm anxious to see what Percival Benson thinks of Olga when he
gets back--they would be such opposites. Olga is working with her
ox-team on the land. Two days ago I rode out on Paddy and watched her.
There was something Homeric about it, something Sorolla would have
jumped at. She seemed so like her oxen. She moved like them, and her
eyes were like theirs. She has the same strength and solemnity when she
walks. She's so primitive and natural and instinctive in her actions.
Yesterday, after dinner, she curled up on a pile of hay at one end of
the corral and fell asleep for a few minutes, flat in the strong noonday
light. I saw Dinky-Dunk stop on his way to the stable and stand and look
down at her. I slipped out beside him. "God, what a woman!" he said
under his breath. A vague stab of jealousy went through me as I heard
him say that. Then I looked at her hand, large, relaxed, roughened with
all kinds of weather and calloused with heavy work. And this time it was
an equally vague st