“We all knew, of course, that you were waiting,” sneered my husband.
Peter turned to fling back an answer to that, but I stepped between them. I was tired of being haggled over, like marked-down goods on a bargain-counter. I was tired of being a passive agent before forces that seemed stripping me of my last shred of dignity. I was tired of the shoddiness of the entire shoddy situation.
And I told them so. I told them I’d no intention of being bargained over, and that I’d had rather enough of men for the rest of my natural life, and if Duncan wanted his freedom he was at liberty to take it without the slightest opposition from me. And I said a number of other things, which I have no wish either to remember or record. But it resulted in Duncan staring at me in a resurrection-plant sort of way, and in Peter rather dolorously taking his departure. I wanted to call him back, but I couldn’t carpenter together any satisfactory excuse for his coming back, and I couldn’t see any use in it.
So instead of journeying happily homeward in the cavernous old prairie-schooner, I felt a bit ridiculous as Tokudo impassively carried our belongings out to the canvas-covered wagon and Poppsy and I climbed 371 aboard. The good citizens of American Hill stared after us as we rumbled down through the neatly boulevarded streets, and I felt suspiciously like a gypsy-queen who’d been politely requested by the local constabulary to move on.
It wasn’t until we reached the open country that my spirits revived. Then the prairie seemed to reach out its hand to me and give me peace. We camped, that first night, in the sheltering arm of a little coulée threaded by a tiny stream. We cooked bacon and eggs and coffee while Whinnie out-spanned his team and put up his tent.
I sat on an oat-sack, after supper, with Poppsy between my knees, watching the evening stars come out. They were worlds, I remembered, some of them worlds perhaps with sorrowing men and women on them. And they seemed very lonely and far-away worlds, until I heard the drowsy voice of my Poppsy say up through the dusk: “In two days more, Mummy, we’ll be back to Dinkie, won’t we?”
And there was much, I remembered, for which a mother should be thankful.