And off she went—off to the barn, and the next moment there was a lonely, yearning child-wife sobbing her heart out on Sarah Maria's neck.
Evidently there was a bond between these two, for Nannie was neither hooked nor kicked, and when Sarah Maria behaved peacefully at both ends it was manifest that her heart was touched.
X
Steve returned from town the evening following Nannie's outburst with a mind heavy laden. That had been his mental condition, indeed, much of the time since he turned farmer, and I may add that his thoughts occasionally ran in a sarcastic vein—a course ordinarily foreign to him. Shortly before that crucial point in his career, his marriage to Nannie, Randolph Chance had loaned him a beautiful idyl, termed “Liberty and a Living.” Randolph himself had read this as a thirsty man reads of cool, rock-paved brooks; Steve read it as a poet, a dreamer, but it would no doubt have had a marked effect upon his character had he not closely followed it up with Charles Dudley Warner's “Summer in a Garden,” much as one would chase a poison with its antidote, only in this case the order was reversed, the latter resembling the poison, since it awoke in his mind gloomy forebodings and inspired satirical reflections upon the universal mother.
Tuned to this key, he was no doubt ill-prepared, while turning the clod, to receive into his soul the sweet influences of rural life, and by reason of their elevating beauty, to be fortified against those drawbacks and trials with which all paths abound.
Truth to tell, Steve was discouraged. He had begun to realize that he had on his hands not only a small farm, for the tillage of which he was ill-contrived, but a large child as well, whose rearing and developing—— Just here he came to a sudden halt in his thought, and an odd word leaped in:
“Cooking!”
Then the name of that newspaper clipping of which Randolph once told him—
“How to Cook Wives.”
“Well, how in thunder?” he asked himself, and walked homeward from the station.