re was a
jumpy little nerve in my left temple going for all the world like a
telegraph-key. And then I gave up.

I sat down and stared at that neatly folded pile of baby-clothes two
feet high, a layer-cake of whites and faded blues and pinks. I stared
at it, and began to gulp tragically, wallowing in a wave of self-pity.
I felt so sorry for myself that I let my flat-iron burn a hole clean
through the ironing-sheet, without even smelling it. That, I told
myself, was all that life could be to me, just a round of washing and
ironing and meal-getting and mending, fetch and carry, work and worry,
from sun-up until sun-down, and many a time until midnight.

And what, I demanded of the frying-pan on its nail above the
stove-shelf, was I getting out of it? What was it leading to? And what
would it eventually bring me? It would eventually bring me crabbed and
crow-footed old age, and fallen arches and a slabsided figure that a
range-pinto would shy at. It would bring me empty year after year out
here on the edge of Nowhere. It would bring me drab and spiritless
drudgery, and faded eyes, and the heart under my ribs slowly but
surely growing as dead as a door-nail, and the joy of living just as
slowly but surely going out of my life, the same as the royal blue had
faded out of Dinkie's little denim jumpers.

At that very moment, I remembered, there were women listening to
symphony music in Carnegie Hall, and women sitting in willow-rockers
at Long Beach contentedly listening to the sea-waves. There were women
driving through Central Park, soft and lovely with early spring, or
motoring up to the Clairemont for supper and watching the searchlights
from the war-ships along the Hudson, and listening to the music on the
roof-gardens and dancing their feet off at that green-topped heaven of
youth which overlooks the Plaza where Sherman's bronze horse forever
treads its spray of pine. There were happy-go-lucky girls crowding the
soda-fountains and regaling themselves on fizzy water and fruit
sirups, and dropping in at first nights or motoring out for sea-food
dinners along lamp-pearled and moonlit boulevards of smooth asphalt.
And here I was planted half-way up to the North Pole, with coyotes for
company, with a husband who didn't love me, and not a jar of decent
face-cream within fifteen miles of the shack! I was lost there in a
sea of flat desolation, without companionable neighbors, without an
idea, without a chance for any exchang