ee how we'd all weathered the
storm. They found the chicken-coop once more right side up, and
everything ship-shape. Percy promptly asked where Olga was. I pointed
her out to him, breast-high in the growing wheat. She looked like Ceres,
in her big, new, loose-fitting blue waist, with the noonday sun on her
yellow-gold head and her mild ruminative eyes with their misted sky-line
effect. She always seems to fit into the landscape here. I suppose it's
because she's a born daughter of the soil. And a sea of wheat makes a
perfect frame for that massive, benignant figure of hers.

I looked at Percy, at thin-nosed, unpractical Percy, with all his
finicky sensibilities, with his high fastidious reticences, with his
effete, inbred meagerness of bone and sinew, with his distinguished
pride of distinguished race rather running to seed. And I stood
marveling at the wisdom of old Mother Nature, who was so plainly
propelling him toward this revitalizing, revivifying, reanimalizing,
redeeming type which his pale austerities of spirit could never quite
neutralize. Even Dinky-Dunk has noticed what is taking place. He saw
them standing side by side in the grain. When he came in he pointed them
out to me, and merely said, "_Hermann und Dorothea_!" But I remembered
my Goethe well enough to understand.

_Monday the Twenty-eighth_

I woke Dinky-Dunk up last night crying beside him in bed. I just got to
thinking about things again, how far away we were from everything, how
hard it would be to get help if we needed it, and how much I'd give if I
only had you, Matilda Anne, for the next few weeks.... I got up and went
to the window and looked out. The moon was big and yellow, like a
cheese. And the midnight prairie itself seemed so big and wide and
lonely, and I seemed such a tiny speck on its face, so far away from
every one, from God himself, that the courage went out of my body like
the air out of a tire. Dinky-Dunk was right; it is life that is taming
me.

I stood at the window praying, and then I slipped back into bed.
Dinky-Dunk works so hard and gets so tired that it would take a Chinese
devil-gong to waken him, once he's asleep. He did not stir when I crept
back into bed. And that, as I lay there wide awake, made me feel that
even my own husband had betrayed me. And I _bawled_. I must have shaken
the bed, for Dinky-Dunk finally did wake up. I couldn't tell him what
was the matter. I blubbered out that I only wanted him to ho