en a crude bathroom. But Bella
remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly,
surely, the effect of thirty-odd years of nagging was beginning to tell
on Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the
coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold.

Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, but slack,
like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and
crying down with the rich. They had two children. Minnie wrote of them,
and of the delights of city life. Movies every night. Halsted Street
just around the corner. The big stores. State Street. The L took you
downtown in no time. Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld,
after one of those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a
terrible termagant.

* * * * *

When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't
dream that a world would be clamouring for hogs and wheat for four long
years. When the time came he had them, and sold them fabulously. But
wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike
with seven other farm boys from the district left for the nearest
training camp that was to fit them for France and war.

Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics.
Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that day. When
the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how
the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue
shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on the quick, light step
began to lag a little.

He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone. There were
no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of
rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice
seemed never to stop its plaint.

"There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thing you'll
die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands." At that he
eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance was wearing
down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too. But something in
him was. Something that had resisted her all these years. Something that
had made him master and superior in spite of everything.

* * * * *

In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma
Byers came to him often. She