like a bag of
wheat. I started to fight him again. But I couldn't beat him off. Then
all my strength seemed to go. He was laughing himself, but it frightened
me a little to see his pupils so big that his eyes looked black. I felt
like a lamb in a lion's jaw, Dinky-Dunk is so much stronger than I am. I
lay there quite still, with my eyes closed. I went flop. I knew I was
conquered.

Then I came back to life. I suddenly realized that it was mid-day, in
the open air between the bald prairie-floor and God's own blue sky,
where Olie could stumble on us at any moment--and possibly die with his
boots on! Dinky-Dunk was kissing my left eyelid. It was a cup his lips
just seemed to fit into. I tried to move. But he held me there. He held
me so firmly that it hurt. Yet I couldn't help hugging him. Poor, big,
foolish, baby-hearted Dinky-Dunk! And poor, weak, crazy, storm-tossed
me! But, oh, God, it's glorious, in some mysterious way, to stir the
blood of a strong big man! It's heaven--and I don't quite know why. But
I love to see Dinky-Dunk's eyes grow black. Yet it makes me a little
afraid of him. I can hear his heart pound, sometimes, quite distinctly.
And sometimes there seems something so pathetic about it all--we are
such puny little mites of emotion played on by nature for her own
immitigable ends! But every woman wants to be loved. Dinky-Dunk asked me
why I shut my eyes when he kisses me. I wonder why? Sometimes, too, he
says my kisses are wicked, and that he likes 'em wicked. He's a funny
mixture. He's got the soul of a Scotch Calvinist tangled up in him
somewhere, and after the storm he's very apt to grow pious and a bit
preachy. But he has feelings, only he's ashamed of them. I think I'm
taking a little of the ice-crust off his emotions. He's a stiff clay
that needs to be well stirred up and turned over before it can mellow.
And I must be a sandy loam that wastes all its strength in one short
harvest. That sounds as though I were getting to be a real farmer's wife
with a vast knowledge of soils, doesn't it? At any rate my husband, out
of his vast knowledge of me, says I have the swamp-cedar trick of
flaring up into sudden and explosive attractiveness. Then, he says, I
shower sparks. As I've already told him, I'm a wild woman, and will be
hard to tame, for as Victor Hugo somewhere says, we women are only
perfected devils!

_Wednesday the Eighth_

I've cut off my hair, right bang off. When I got up yesterday morn