“Ah,” observed Agatha, “I can imagine Gregory hating it. As a matter of fact, I like him for it.”
“Then the farmer’s wife must bake, and mend her husband’s clothes. Indeed, it’s not unusual for her to mend for the hired man, too. Besides that, there are always odds and ends of tasks, but the time when you feel the strain most is in the winter. Then you sit at night, shivering as a rule, beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you have probably read three or four times before. Outside, the frost is Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you wake up when the fire burns low. There’s no life, no company, rarely a new face, and if you go to a dance or a supper somewhere, perhaps once a month, you ride back on a bob-sled and are frozen almost stiff beneath the robes.”
“Still,” interposed Agatha, “that does not last.”
The man understood her. “Oh!” he said, “one makes progress—that is, if one can stand the strain—but, as the one way of doing it is to sow for a larger harvest and break fresh sod every year, there can be no slackening in the meanwhile. Every dollar must be guarded and plowed into the soil again.”
He broke off, feeling that he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him, and Agatha asked one question.
“A woman who didn’t slacken could make the struggle easier for the man, couldn’t she?”
“Yes,” Wyllard assured her, “in every way. Still, she would have a great deal to bear.”
Agatha’s face softened. “Ah,” she commented, “she would not grudge the effort in the case of one she loved.”
She looked up again with a smile. “I wonder,” she added, “if you really thought I should flinch.”
“When I first heard of it, I thought it quite likely. Then when I read your letter my doubts vanished.”