you'd been Indianized to that extent," murmured my
husband.

"Being Indianized," I proceeded, "seems to carry the inference of also
being barbarized. But it isn't quite that, Dinky-Dunk, for there's
something almost spiritually satisfying about this prairie life if
you've only got the eyes to see it. I think that's because the prairie
always seems so majestically beautiful to me. I can see your lip curl
again, but I know I'm right. When I throw open my windows of a morning
and see that placid old never-ending plain under its great wash of
light something lifts up in my breast, like a bird, and no matter how
a mere man has been doing his best to make me miserable that something
stands up on the tip of my heart and does its darnedest to sing. It
impresses me as life on such a sane and gigantic scale that I want to
be an actual part of it, that I positively ache to have a share in its
immensities. It seems so fruitful and prodigal and generous and
patient. It's so open-handed in the way it produces and gives and
returns our love. And there's a completeness about it that makes me
feel it can't possibly be wrong."

"The Eskimo, I suppose, feels very much the same in his little igloo
of ice with a pot of whale-blubber at his elbow," observed my
husband.

"You're a brute, my dear Diddums, and more casually cruel than a
Baffin-land cannibal," I retorted. "But we'll let it pass. For I'm
talking about something that's too fundamental to be upset by a bitter
tongue. There was a time, I know, when I used to fret about the finer
things I thought I was losing out of life, about the little hand-made
fripperies people have been forced to conjure up and carpenter
together to console them for having to live in human beehives made of
steel and concrete. But I'm beginning to find out that joy isn't a
matter of geography and companionship isn't a matter of over-crowded
subways. And the strap-hangers and the train-catchers and the
first-nighters can have what they've got. I don't seem to envy them
the way I used to. I don't need a Louvre when I've got the Northern
Lights to look at. And I can get along without an AEolian Hall when
I've got a little music in my own heart--for it's only what you've got
there, after all, that really counts in this world!"

"All of which means," concluded my husband, "that you are most
unmistakably growing old!"

"You have already," I retorted, "referred to me as a withered
beauty."

Dinky-Dunk studied