nd I can't help feeling that all along there was something
in that simple life we didn't value enough. We were just rubes and hicks
and clodhoppers and hay-tossers in those days, and we weren't staying
awake nights worrying about land-speculations and water-fronts and
trying to make ourselves millionaires when we might have been making
ourselves more at peace with our own souls. And now that our card-house
of high finance has gone to smash, I realize more than ever that I've
got to be at peace with my own soul and on speaking terms with my own
husband. And if this strikes you as an exceptionally long-winded sermon,
my beloved, it's merely to make plain to you that I haven't surrendered
to any sudden wave of emotionalism when I talk about migrating over to
that Harris Ranch. It's nothing more than good old hard-headed,
practical self-preservation, for I wouldn't care to live without you,
Dinky-Dunk, any more than I imagine you'd care to live without your own
self-respect."

I sat back, after what I suppose was the longest speech I ever made in
my life, and studied my lord and master's face. It was not an easy map
to decipher, for man, after all, is a pretty complex animal and even
in his more elemental moments is played upon by pretty complex forces.
And if there was humility on that lean and rock-ribbed countenance of
my soul-mate there was also antagonism, and mixed up with the
antagonism was a sprinkling of startled wonder, and tangled up with
the wonder was a slightly perplexed brand of contrition, and
interwoven with that again was a suggestion of allegiance revived, as
though he had forgotten that he possessed a wife who had a heart and
mind of her own, who was even worth sticking to when the rest of the
world was threatening to give him the cold shoulder. He felt
abstractedly down in his coat pocket for his pipe, which is always a
helpful sign.

"It's big and fine of you, Chaddie, to put it that way," he began,
rather awkwardly, and with just a touch of color coming to his rather
gray-looking cheek-bones. "But can't you see that now it's the
children we've got to think of?"

"I _have_ thought of them," I quietly announced. As though any mother,
on prairie or in metropolis, didn't think of them first and last and
in-between-whiles! "And that's what simplifies the situation. I want
them to have a fair chance. I'd rather they--"

"It's not quite that criminal," cut in Dinky-Dunk, with almost an
angry flush creep