f her own selfish ends.

Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colours of
pretence in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been too
honest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentally
truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this
slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married. He
had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing
was a ceremony and in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult.
He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of
fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of
skin and eye, and to the way her blonde hair swept away in a clean line
from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary
of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitues of Old
Red Front Huckins's bar.

They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prospered
in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here,
eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the
Mississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he was
too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew looked forward
to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella,
his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the
county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her
plaint was the same: "If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a farm
all my life, slavin' for a pack of men folks day and night, I'd rather
have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here."

Her school-teacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as
slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin
coarsened from lack of care and overeating. And in her children's ears
she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You can get
away from it," she counselled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't you be a rube
like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy. And they profited by
her advice. Minnie went to work at Commercial when she was seventeen, an
over-developed girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery. At twenty
she married an artisan, a surly fellow with anarchistic tendencies. They
moved from town to town. He never stuck long at one job. John, the older
boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was her mother's daughter.
Restle