“But what are you getting out of it?” she finally demanded. “What is going to happen? What ever has happened?”
“To whom?” I asked, resenting the unconscious cruelty of her questioning.
“To you,” was the reply of the hard-glazed young hedonist confronting me.
“Are you flattering me with the inference that I was cut out for better things?” I interrogated as my gaze met Susie’s. It was her turn to color up a bit. Then she sighed again, and shook her head.
“I don’t suppose it’s doing either of us one earthly bit of good,” she said with a listless small smile of atonement. “And I’m sorry.”
So we let the skeletons stalk away from our pleasant fireside and secrete themselves in their customary closets of silence.
But I’ve been thinking a good deal about that 243 question of Susie’s. What has happened to me, out here on the prairie? What has indeed come into my life?...
I married young and put a stop to those romantic adventurings which enrich the lives of most girls and enlighten the days of many women. I married a man and lived with him in a prairie shack, and sewed and baked for him, and built a new home and lost it, and began over again. I had children, and saw one of them die, and felt my girlhood slip away, and sold butter and eggs, and loved the man of my choice and cleaved to him and planned for my children, until I saw the man of my choice love another woman. And still I clung to my sparless hulk of a home, hoping to hold close about me the children I had brought into the world and would some day lose again to the world. And that was all. That was everything. It is true, nothing much has ever happened to me....
But I stop, to think this over. If these are the small things, then what are the big things of life? What is it that other women get? I have sung and been happy; I have known great joy and walked big with Hope. I have loved and been loved. I have known sorrow, and I have known birth, and I have sat face to face with death. I have, after all, pretty well 244 run the whole gamut, without perhaps realizing it. For these, after all, are the big things, the elemental things, of life. They are the basic things which leave scant room for the momentary fripperies and the hand-made ornaments of existence....
Heigho! I seem to grow into a melancholy Jacques with the advancing years. That’s the way of life, I suppose. But I’ve no intention of throwing up the sponge. If I can no longer get as much fun out of the game as I want, I can at least watch my offspring taking their joy out of it. God be thanked for giving us our children! We can still rest our tired old eyes on them, just as the polisher of precious stones used to keep an emerald in front of him, to relieve his strained vision by gazing at its soft and soothing greenness.