o fall in love with Olga.
Yesterday I saw him staring at her neck. She's the type of woman that
would really make the right sort of wilderness wife. She seems an
integral part of the prairie, broad-bosomed, fecund, opulent. And she's
so placid and large and soft-spoken and easy to live with. She has none
of my moods and tantrums.

Her corsets came to-day, and I showed her how to put them on. She is
incontinently proud of them, but in my judgment they only make her
ridiculous. It's as foolish as putting a French _toque_ on one of her
oxen. The skin of Olga's great shoulders is as smooth and creamy as a
baby's. I have been watching her eyes. They are not a dark blue, but in
a strong side-light they seem deep wells of light, layer on layer of
azure. And she is mysterious to me, calmly and magnificently
inscrutable. And I once thought her an uncouth animal. But she is a
great help. She has planted rows and rows of sweet peas all about Casa
Grande and is starting to make a kitchen garden, which she's going to
fence off and look after with her own hands. It will be twice the size
of Olie's. But I do hope she doesn't ever grow into something mysterious
to my Dinky-Dunk. This morning she said I ought to work in the garden,
that the more I kept on my feet the better it would be for me later on.

As for Dinky-Dunk, the poor boy is working himself gaunt. Yet tired as
he is, he tries to read a few pages of something worth while every
night. Sometimes we take turns in reading. Last night he handed me over
his volume of Spencer with a pencil mark along one passage. This passage
said: "Intellectual activity in women is liable to be diminished after
marriage by that antagonism between individuation and reproduction
everywhere operative throughout the organic world." I don't know why,
but that passage made me as hot as a hornet. In the background of my
brain I carried some vague memory of George Eliot once catching this
same philosophizing Spencer fishing with a composite fly, and, remarking
on his passion for generalizations, declaring that he even fished with a
generalization. So I could afford to laugh. "Spencer's idea of a
tragedy," I told Dinky-Dunk, "is a deduction killed by a fact!" And
again I smiled my Mona-Lisa smile. "And I'm going to be one of the
facts!" I proudly proclaimed.

Dinky-Dunk, after thinking this over, broke into a laugh. "You know,
Gee-Gee," he solemnly announced, "there are times when you seem almost
clever