onestly in the face,
Nature in her inexorable economy working out her inexorable ends. If I
hadn't loved Dinky-Dunk, fondly, foolishly, abandonedly, there would
have been no little Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee. They would have
been left to wander like disconsolate little ghosts through that
lonely and twilit No-Man's Land of barren love and unwanted babes. And
the only thing that keeps me human, nowadays, that keeps me from being
a woman with a dead soul, a she-being of untenanted hide and bones and
dehydrated ham-strings, is my kiddies. The thought of them, at any
time of the day, can put a cedilla under my heart to soften it....

Struthers, who is to go in to Buckhorn with the children when they
have their picture taken, is already deep in elaborating preparations
for that expedition. She is improvising an English nurse's uniform and
has asked if there might be one picture of her and the children.

_Tuesday the Fifteenth_

The children have been away for a whole day, the first time in family
history. And oh, what a difference it makes in this lonely little
prairie home of ours! The quietness, the emptiness, the desolation of
it all was something quite beyond my imagination. I know now that I
could never live apart from them. Whatever happens, I shall not be
separated from my kiddies....

I spent my idle time in getting Peter's music-box in working order.
Dinky-Dunk, who despises it, thoughtlessly sat on the package of
records and broke three of them. I've been trying over the others.
They sound tinny and flat, and I'm beginning to suspect I haven't my
sound-box adjusted right. I've a hunger to hear good music. And
without quite knowing it, I've been craving for city life again, for
at least a taste of it, for even a chocolate cream-soda at a Huyler
counter. Dinky-Dunk yesterday said that I was a cloudy creature, and
accused me of having a mutinous mouth. Men seem to think that love
should be like an eight-day clock, with a moment or two of industrious
winding-up rewarded by a long week of undeviating devotion.

_Sunday the Twenty-seventh_

The thrashing outfits are over at Casa Grande, and my being a mere
spectator of the big and busy final act of the season's drama reminds
me of three years ago, just before Dinkie arrived. Struthers, however,
is at Casa Grande and in her glory, the one and only woman in a circle
of nine active-bodied men.

I begin t