, but it was a tumble into a pansy-bed. And I was thinking that
luck would surely be with me a second time, though thought skidded,
like a tire on a wet pavement, every time I tried to foresee what this
newer change would mean to me and mine.

"You're not going to face another three years of drudgery and
shack-dirt," declared Dinky-Dunk, following, oddly enough, my own line
of thought. "You went through that once, and once was enough. It's not
fair. It's not reasonable. It's not even thinkable. You weren't made
for that sort of thing, and--"

"Listen to me," I broke in, doing my best to speak calmly and quietly.
"Those three years were really the happiest three years of all my life.
I love to remember them, for they mean so much more than all the others.
There were a lot of the frills and fixin's of life that we had to do
without. But those three years brought us closer together, Dinky-Dunk,
than we have ever been since we moved into this big house and got on
bowing terms again with luxury. I don't know whether you've given it
much thought or not, husband o' mine, but during the last year or two
there's been a change taking place in us. You've been worried and busy
and forever on the wing, and there have been days when I've felt you
were almost a stranger to me, as though I'd got to be a sort of accident
in your life. Remember, Honey-Chile, I'm not blaming you; I'm only
pointing out certain obvious truths, now the time for a little honest
talk seems to have cropped up. You were up to your ears in a fight, in a
tremendously big fight, for success and money; and you were doing it
more for me and Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee than for yourself. You
couldn't help remembering that I'd been a city girl and imagining that
prairie-life was a sort of penance I was undergoing before passing on to
the joys of paradise in an apartment-hotel with a mail-chute outside the
door and the sound of the Elevated outside the windows. And you were
terribly wrong in all that, for there have been days and days,
Dinky-Dunk, when I've been homesick for that old slabsided ranch-shack
and the glory of seeing you come in ruddy and hungry and happy for the
ham and eggs and bread I'd cooked with my own hands. It seemed to bring
us so gloriously close together. It seemed so homy and happy-go-lucky
and soul-satisfying in its completeness, and we weren't forever fretting
about bank-balances and taxes and over-drafts. I was just a rancher's
wife then--a