There she found life and
talk and color. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she
always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or
with an armful of clean towels.

Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself, "I want to marry Bella."
He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly to marry Emma
Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. As for Bella, she
laughed at him, but she was scared, too. They both fought the thing,
she selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm
eyes and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal for
Bella was merely that of the magnetic male. She never once thought of
his finer qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and
alluring woman. But in the end they married. The neighborhood was
rocked with surprise.

Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colors of
pretense in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been too
honest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentally
truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this
slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married.
He had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when
tubbing was a ceremony in an environment that made bodily nicety
difficult. He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her
appearance of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a
natural clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blond hair swept
away in a clean line from her forehead. For the rest, she was a
slattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a credit
to any of the habitues of old Red Front Huckins' bar.

They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prospered
in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here,
eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the
Mississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he
was too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew looked
forward to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared
by Bella, his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper
in the county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness,
her plaint was the same--"If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a
farm all my life, slavin' for a pack of menfolks day and night, I'd
rather have died. Migh