ning at one corner of their tract,
claiming this reduces the time spent with plows out of the ground. But
that looked too complex for me to tackle.

Then, too, machinery has one thing in common with man: they occasionally
get out of kilter at the very time you expect most from them. So this
morning I had to bend, if I did not actually break, the Sabbath by
working on my tractor-engine. I put on Ikkie's overalls--for I _have_
succeeded in coercing Ikkie into a jumper and the riding-seat of the old
gang-plow--and went out and studied that tractor. I was determined to
understand just what was giving the trouble.

It was two hours before I located the same, which was caused by the
timer. But I've conquered the doggoned thing, and got her to spark
right, and I went a couple of rounds, Sunday and all, just to make
sure she was in working order. And neither my actions nor my language,
I know, are those of a perfect lady. But any one who'd lamped me in
that get-up, covered with oil and dust and dirt, would know that never
again could I be a perfect lady. I'm a wiper, a greaser, a clodhopper,
and, according to the sullen and brooding-eyed Ikkie, a bit of a
slave-driver. And the odd part of it all is that I'm wringing a
perverse sort of enjoyment out of the excitement and the novelty of
the thing. I'm being something more than a mere mollusk. I'm making my
power felt, and producing results. And self-expression, I find, is the
breath of life to my soul. But I've scarcely time to do my hair, and
my complexion is gone, and I've got cracks in my cheek-skin. I'm
getting old and ugly, and no human being will ever again love me. Even
my own babies gape at me kind of round-eyed when I take them in my
arms.

But I'm wrong there, and I know I'm wrong. My little Dinkie will
always love me. I know that by the way his little brown arms cling
about my wind-roughened neck, by the way he burrows in against my
breast and hangs on to me and hollers for his Mummsy when she's out of
sight. He's not a model youngster, I know. I'm afraid I love him too
much to demand perfection from him. It's the hard and selfish women,
after all, who make the ideal mothers--at least from the standpoint of
the disciplinarian. For the selfish woman refuses to be blinded by
love, just as she refuses to be imposed upon and declines to be
troubled by the thought of inflicting pain on those perverse little
toddlers who grow so slowly into the knowledge of what is right