Casa Grande has had an invasion of visitors. It was precious old Percy and his Olga who blew in on us, after being swallowed up by the Big Silence for almost four long years. They came without warning, which is the free and easy way of the westerner, appearing in a mud-splattered and dust-covered Ford that had carried them blithely over two hundred and thirty miles of prairie trails. And with them they brought a quartet of rampageous young buckaroos who promptly turned our sedate homestead into a rodeo.

Percy himself is browner and stouter and more rubicund than I might have expected, with just a sprinkling of gray under his lopsided Stetson to announce that Time hasn’t been standing still for any of us. But one would never have taken him for an ex-lunger. And there is a wholesomeness about the man, for all his quietness, which draws one to him. Olga herself still again impressed me as a 130 Zorn etching come to life, as a Norse myth in petticoats, with the same old largeness of limb and the same old suggestion of sky-line vastnesses about her. She still looks as though the Lord had made her when the world was young and the women of Homer did their spinning in the sunlight. Some earlier touch of morning freshness is gone from her, it’s true, for you can’t move about with four little toddlers in your wake and still suggest the budding vine. But that morning freshness has been supplanted by a full and mellow noonday contentedness which is not without its placid appeal. To her husband, at any rate, she seems mysteriously perfect. He can still sit and stare at her with a startlingly uxorious eye. And she, in turn, bathes him in that pale lunar stare of meditative approval which says plainer than words just how much her “man” means to her.

Percy and his family stayed overnight with us and hit the trail again yesterday morning. An old friend of Percy’s from Brasenose has taken a parish some forty odd miles south of Buckhorn—a parish, by the way, which ought to shake a little of the Oxford dreaminess out of his system—and Olga and her husband are “packing” their newly-arrived Toddler 131 Number Four down to the new curate to have him christened.

We were all a bit shy and constrained, during our first hour together but this soon wore away. It wasn’t long before Olga’s offspring and mine were fraternizing together, over-running the bathroom tub and emptying our water-tank, and making a concerted attack on one of Dinky-Dunk’s self-binders, which would have been dismantled in short order, if Percy hadn’t gone out to investigate the cause of the sudden quiet.

“My boy loves everything with wheels,” explained the proud Olga, in extenuation of her Junior’s oil-blackened fingers.

That brought me up short, for I was on the point of making the same statement about my Dinkie. After thinking it over, in fact, I realized that every normal boy loves everything with wheels. And it began to dawn on me that there was nothing so extraordinary, after all, in my son’s fondness for machinery. I began to see that he was merely one of a very wide-spread clan, when, an hour later, the entire excited six united in playing Indian about the haystacks, and kept it up until even the docile Pauline Augusta was driven to revolt against so 132 persistently being the Pale-face captive. She announced that she was tired of being scalped. So, for variety’s sake, the boys turned to riding and roping and hog-tying one another like the true little westerners they were, and many an imaginary brand was planted on many a bleating set of ribs.

But now they are gone, and I’ve been thinking a great deal about Olga. I fancy I have even been envying her a little. She’s of that annealing softness which can rivet and hold a family together. I’ve even been trying to solace myself with the claim that she’s a trifle ox-like in her make-up. But that is not being just to Olga. She makes a perfect wife. She is as tranquil-minded as summer moonlight on a convent-roof. She is as soft-spoken as a wind-harp swinging in an abbey door. She surrenders to the will of her husband and neither frets nor questions nor walks with discontent. I suppose she has a will of her own, packed somewhere away in that benignant big body of hers, but she never obtrudes it. She placidly awaits her time, as the bosom of the prairie awaits its harvesting. And I’ve been wondering if that really isn’t the best type of woman for married life, the autumnally contented 133 and pensively quiet woman who can remain unruffled by man and his meanderings.

I wasn’t built according to that plan, and I suppose I’ve had to pay for it. I’ve just about concluded, in fact, that I would have been a hard nut for any man to crack. I’ve never been conspicuous for my efforts at self-obliteration. I’ve a temper that’s as brittle as a squirrel bone. I’m too febrile and flightly, too chameleon-mooded and critical. The modern wife should be always a conservative. She should hold back her husband’s impulses of nervous expenditure, conserving his tranquil-mindedness about the same as cotton-waste in a journal-box conserves oil. Heaven knows I started with theories enough—but I must be a good deal like old Schramm, that teacher of Heine’s who was so busy inditing a study of Universal Peace that his boys had all the chance they could wish for pummeling one another. But I’ve been thinking, Reuben. And I’m going to see if I can’t save what’s left of the ship. I’m no Renaissance cherub on a cloudlet, but I’m going to knuckle down and see if I can’t jibe along a little better with my old Dinky-Dunk. I’ve decided to back off and give him his chance. If he’s set on selling Alabama Ranch, on the terms he’s mentioned, 134 I’m not going to object. He’s determined to make money, to advance. And I don’t want to see him accusing me of lying down in the shafts!... What is more, I’m going out in the fields, when the push is on, to help stook the wheat. That may wear me down and make me a little more like Olga.