“Dirk goes with me.”
“You don’t know what you are doing, Mrs. DeJong. The Haymarket is no place for a decent woman. As for the boy! There is card-playing, drinking—all manner of wickedness—daughters of Jezebel on the street, going among the wagons.”
“Really!” said Selina. It sounded thrilling, after twelve years on the farm.
“You must not go.”
“The vegetables are rotting in the ground. And Dirk and I must live.”
“Remember the two sparrows. ‘One of them shall not fall on the ground without’—Matthew X-29.”
“I don’t see,” replied Selina, simply, “what good that does the sparrow, once it’s fallen.”
By Monday afternoon the parlour curtains of every High Prairie farmhouse that faced the Halsted road were agitated as though by a brisk wind between the hours of three and five, when the market wagons were to be seen moving toward Chicago. Klaas Pool at dinner that noon had spoken of Selina’s contemplated trip with a mingling of pity and disapproval.
“It ain’t decent a woman should drive to market.”
Mrs. Klaas Pool (they still spoke of her as the Widow Paarlenberg) smiled her slippery crooked smile. “What could you expect! Look how she’s always acted.”