“Nothing!” she said, and laughed painfully, satirizing the word. “Nothing! Nothing at all!”
“But, dear——”
“Never mind!” She shivered, then sighed profoundly, and stared at him with curiosity, as if she were examining something unfamiliar. “So this is what it’s going to be like, is it?” she asked.
“What?”
“I mean this place! These people! This—this climate!”
But here Dan was touched upon his native pride. “Climate? Why, this is the best climate in the world, Lena! There isn’t any climate to compare with it! And as for this little warm spell just now, why, you see we do need some hot weather.”
“Like this?”
“Why, certainly! You see this is the greatest corn belt in the country, dear. If it wasn’t for a stretch or two of good corn-growin’ weather like this every summer, the farmers wouldn’t get half a crop, and there’d be a big drop in prosperity.”
“And you’d rather have it hot like this, then?” Lena asked, seeming to find him increasingly strange. “You want the farmers to grow their corn, no matter what happens to your wife?”
“But, my goodness!” he cried, in his perplexity. “I don’t run the weather, Lena! It don’t make any difference how I might want it, the weather just is the way it is. Besides, we don’t mind it so much.”