I’ve been wondering to-day just what I’d do if I had to earn my own living. I could run a ranch, I suppose, if I still had one, but two or three years of such work would see me a hatchet-faced old termagant with fallen arches and a prairie-squint. Or I could raise chickens and peddle dated eggs in a flivver-and fresco hen-coops with whitewash until the trap-nest of time swallowed me up in oblivion. Or I could take a rural school somewhere and teach the three R’s to little Slovenes and Frisians and French-Canadians even more urgently in need of soap and water. Or perhaps I could be housekeeper for one of our new beef-kings in his new Queen-Anne Norman-Georgian Venetian palace of Alberta sandstone with tesselated towers and bungalow sleeping-porches. Or I might even peddle magazines, or start a little bakery in one of the little board-fronted shops of Buckhorn, or take in plain sewing and dispose of home-made preserves to the Élite of the community. 191

But each and all of them would be mere gestures of defeat. I’m of no value to the world. There was a time when I regarded myself as quite a Somebody, and prided myself on having an idea or two. Didn’t Percy even once denominate me as “a window-dresser”? There was a time when I didn’t have to wait to see if the pearl-handled knife was the one intended for the fish-course, and I could walk across a waxed floor without breaking my neck and do a bit of shopping in the Rue de la Paix without being taken for a tourist. But that was a long, long time ago. And life during the last few years has both humbled me and taught me my limitations. I’m a house-wife, now, and nothing more—and not even a successful house-wife. I’ve let everything fall away except the thought of my home and my family. And now I find that the basket into which I so carefully packed all my eggs hasn’t even a bottom to it.

But I’ve no intention of repining. Heaven knows I’ve never wanted to sit on the Mourner’s Bench. I’ve never tried to pull a sour mug, as Dinky-Dunk once inelegantly expressed it. I love life and the joy of life, and I want all of it I can get. I believe in laughter, and I’ve a weakness for men and women who can sing as they work. But I’ve blundered into a 192 black frost, and even though there was something to sing about, there’s scarcely a blue-bird left to do the singing. But sometime, somewhere, there’ll be an end to that silence. The blight will pass, and I’ll break out again. I know it. I don’t intend to be held down. I can’t be held down. I haven’t the remotest idea of how it’s going to happen, but I’m going to love life again, and be happy, and carol out like a meadow-lark on a blue and breezy April morning. It may not come to-morrow, and it may not come the next day. But it’s going to come. And knowing it’s going to come, I can afford to sit tight, and abide my time....

I’ve just had a letter from Uncle Chandler, enclosing snap-shots of the place he’s bought in New Jersey. It looks very palatial and settled and Old-Worldish, shaded and shadowed with trees and softened with herbage, dignified by the hand of time. It reminds me how many and many a long year will have to go by before our bald young prairie can be tamed and petted into a homeyness like that. Uncle Chandler has rather startled me by suggesting that we send Elmer through to him, to go to school in the East. He says the boy can attend Montclair Academy, that he can be taken there and called for every 193 day by faithful old Fisher, in the cabriolet, and that on Sunday he can be toted regularly to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and occasionally go into New York for some of the better concerts, and even have a governess of his own, if he’d care for it. And in case I should be worrying about his welfare Uncle Chandler would send me a weekly night-letter “describing the condition and the activities of the child,” as the letter expresses it. It sounds very appealing, but every time I try to think it over my heart goes down like a dab-chick. My Dinkie is such a little fellow. And he’s my first-born, my man-child, and he means so much in my life. Yet he and his father are not getting along very well together. It would be better, in many respects, if the boy could get away for a while, until the raw edges healed over again. It would be better for both of them. But there’s one thing that would happen: he would grow away from his mother. He’d come back to me a stranger. He’d come back a little ashamed of his shabby prairie mater, with her ten-years-old style of hair-dressing and her moss-grown ideas of things and her bald-looking prairie home with no repose and no dignifying background and neither a private gym nor a butler to wheel in the cinnamon-toast. He’d be having 194 all those things, under Uncle Chandler’s roof: he’d get used to them and he’d expect them.

But there’s one thing he wouldn’t and couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have his mother. And no one can take a mother’s place, with a boy like that. No one could understand him, and make allowances for him, and explain things to him, as his own mother could. I’ve been thinking about that, all afternoon as I ironed his waists and his blue flannellet pajamas with frogs on like his dad’s. And I’ve been thinking of it all evening as I patched his brown corduroy knickers and darned his little stockings and balled them up in a neat little row. I tried to picture myself as packing them away in a trunk, and putting in beside them all the clothes he would need, and the books that he could never get along without, and the childish little treasures he’d have to carry away to his new home. But it was too much for me. There was one thing, I began to see, which could never, never happen. I could never willingly be parted from my Dinkie. I could think of nothing to pay me up for losing him. And he needed me as I needed him. For good or bad, we’d have to stick together. Mother and son, together in some way we’d have to sink or swim!