Well, dear Selina, I suppose you don’t even know that I am married. I married Michael Arnold of Kansas City. The Arnolds were in the packing business there, you know. Michael has gone into business with Pa here in Chicago and I suppose you have heard of Pa’s success. Just all of a sudden he began to make a great deal of money after he left the butcher business and went into the yards—the stockyards, you know. Poor Mamma was so happy these last few years, and had everything that was beautiful. I have two children. Eugene and Pauline.
I am getting to be quite a society person. You would laugh to see me. I am on the Ladies’ Entertainment Committee of the World’s Fair. We are supposed to entertain all the visiting big bugs—that is the lady bugs. There! How is that for a joke?
I suppose you know about the Infanta Eulalie. Of Spain, you know. And what she did about the Potter Palmer ball. . . .
Selina, holding the letter in her work-stained hand, looked up and across the fields and away to where the prairie met the sky and closed in on her; her world. The Infanta Eulalie of Spain. . . . She went back to the letter.
Well, she came to Chicago for the Fair and Mrs. Potter Palmer was to give a huge reception and ball for her. Mrs. P. is head of the whole committee, you know, and I must say she looks queenly with her white hair so beautifully dressed and her diamond dog-collar and her black velvet and all. Well, at the very last minute the Infanta refused to attend the ball because she had just heard that Mrs. P. was an innkeeper’s wife. Imagine! The Palmer House, of course.
Selina, holding the letter in her hand, imagined.
It was in the third year of Selina’s marriage that she first went into the fields to work. Pervus had protested miserably, though the vegetables were spoiling in the ground.
“Let them rot,” he said. “Better the stuff rots in the ground. DeJong women folks they never worked in the fields. Not even in Holland. Not my mother or my grandmother. It isn’t for women.”
Selina had regained health and vigour after two years of wretchedness. She felt steel-strong and even hopeful again, sure sign of physical well-being. Long before now she had realized that this time must inevitably come. So she answered briskly, “Nonsense, Pervus. Working in the field’s no harder than washing or ironing or scrubbing or standing over a hot stove in August. Women’s work! Housework’s the hardest work in the world. That’s why men won’t do it.”
She would often take the boy Dirk with her into the fields, placing him on a heap of empty sacks in the shade. He invariably crawled off this lowly throne to dig and burrow in the warm black dirt. He even made as though to help his mother, pulling at the rooted things with futile fingers, and sitting back with a bump when a shallow root did unexpectedly yield to his tugging.