and
improving the race. It's a duty we owe society, to marry. I don't
believe much in divorce either. Except for unfaithfulness. Unless the
average lot of us are true to the marriage ideal the whole institution
will be tainted. I guess the safety of society lies in each of us
looking at ourselves as average and not exceptional persons. Then we
stick to the conventions. And the conventions weren't foisted on society
from above. They were sweated out from beneath to satisfy; make it
possible for us to endure each other."

Jane Ames threw up both her hands. "O my! You have been hurt or you'd
never be so cold-blooded! I can't look at it as calmly as you do as if
it all belonged to someone else. You never bore children to a man. You
can't realize what selfishness and unkindness from the father of your
children can mean. Do you know that I've borne two babies in this
room--alone--not even a squaw to help me? And I've watched the desert
through the door and I've cursed it for what it's made of my marriage!"
Jane gave a short laugh and held up her knotted, rough hands. "I had
dimples on my knuckles when I came to this country."

Pen looked out the door and tried to picture to herself this other
woman's life.

"I--I guess my safety has lain in my getting an impersonal view of
things," she said apologetically.

"There, the bread is burning!" exclaimed Jane.

Pen laughed reminiscently. "There's a verse that says:

"'Ice cream is very strange; so's a codfish ball,
But the people people marry is the strangest thing of all!'"

"I guess you need me," said Jane, "as much as I need you. There comes
Oscar and I haven't set the table."

Oscar was coming up the dooryard. He stepped a little high, in the gait
of one accustomed to walking in shifting sands. He was big and
upstanding, with a look of honesty that Pen liked.

No one who has not known a desert farmer can realize what his acres
meant to Oscar Ames. The farmer of northern lands loves his acres. But
he did not create them--he did not fight nature for them, until he had
made himself over along with his land.

Nature fights inch by inch every effort of man to harness the desert to
his uses. She scorches the soil with heat. She poisons it with alkali.
She infests it with deadly vermin and--last and supreme touch of
cruelty--she forbids the soil water unless she surrounds the getting of
it with infinite travail and danger.

Heat and sandstorm, failure and famine,