f he's set on selling Alabama Ranch, on the terms he's
mentioned, I'm not going to object. He's determined to make money, to
advance. And I don't want to see him accusing me of lying down in the
shafts!... What is more, I'm going out in the fields, when the push is
on, to help stook the wheat. That may wear me down and make me a
little more like Olga.

_Thursday the Tenth_

It's difficult to be a woman, as the over-sensitive Jean Christophe
once remarked. Men are without those confounding emotions which women
seem to be both cursed with and blessed with. When I announced to
Dinky-Dunk my willingness to part with Alabama Ranch, he took it quite
as a matter of course. He betrayed no tendency to praise me for my
sacrifices, for my willingness to surrender to strangers the land
which had once been our home, the acres on which we'd once been happy
and heavy-hearted. He merely remarked that under the circumstances it
seemed the most sensible thing to do. There's a one-horse lawyer in
Buckhorn who has been asking about the Harris Ranch and Dinky-Dunk
says he suspects this inquiring one has a client up his sleeve.

What I had looked forward to as a talk which might possibly beat down
a few of the barriers of reserve between us proved a bit of a
disappointment. My husband refused to accept me as a heroine. And on
his way out, as ill-luck would have it, he stopped to observe Pauline
Augusta struggling over a letter to her "Uncle Peter." It was a maiden
effort along that line and she was dictating her messages to Dinkie,
who, in turn, was laboriously and carefully inscribing them on my
writing-pad, with a nose and a sympathetically working tongue not more
than ten inches away from the paper. Pauline Augusta, in fact, had
just proclaimed to her amanuensis that "we had a geese for dinner
to-day" when her father stopped to size up the situation.

"To whom are you describing the home circle?" questioned Pauline
Augusta's parent, with an intonation that didn't escape me.

"It's a letter to Uncle Peter," explained Dinkie's little sister. And
I could see Duncan's face harden.

"It's funny my whole family should fall for that damned Quaker!" were
the words he flung over his shoulder at me as he walked out of the
room.

_Tuesday the Fifth_

School has started again. And it's a solemn business, this matter of
planting wisdom in little prairie heads. Dinky-Dunk, who has been up
to his ears in haying and is now watch