self at all, he might
have said:

"Well, I got my work cut out for me, and I do it, and do it right."

There was a tractor, now, of course; and a sturdy, middle-class
automobile in which Bella lolled red-faced when they drove into town.

As Ben Westerveld had prospered, his shrewish wife had reaped her
benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on
twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He
had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an icehouse, a
commodious porch, a washing machine, even a bathroom. But Bella
remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly,
surely, the effect of thirty years of nagging was beginning to tell on
Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the
coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold.

Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, but slack
like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and
crying down with the rich. They had two children.

Minnie wrote of them, and of the delights of city life. Movies every
night. Halsted Street just around the corner. The big stores. State
Street. The el took you downtown in no time. Something going on all
the while. Bella Westerveld, after one of those letters, was more than
a chronic shrew; she became a terrible termagant.

When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't
dream that a world would be clamoring for hogs and wheat for four long
years. When the time came, he had them, and sold them fabulously. But
wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that
Dike, with seven other farm boys from the district, left for the
nearest training camp that was to fit them for France and war.

Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into
hysterics. Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that
day. When the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked
close, how the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the
clean blue shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on, the quick,
light step began to lag a little. He had lost more than a son; his
right-hand helper was gone. There were no farm helpers to be had. Old
Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of rheumatism that winter half
crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice seemed never to stop its
plaint.

"There ain't no sense in you trying to