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As she babbled, which she did, at length, on the stairs down from the office, Sidney realized wretchedly that it was going to take an eloquence far beyond him to convert her to farming and the joys of the land. He was afraid of her, as he had been of his father.

“There’s a drug store over across. Let’s go over and have an ice-cream soda,” he said mildly. “Gosh, it’s hot for September! Up on the farm now it would be cool, and the leaves are just beginning to turn. They’re awful pretty—all red and yellow. ”

“Oh, you and your old farm!” But in her joy she was amiable.

They sat at the bright-colored little table in the drug store, with cheery colored drinks between them. But the scene should have been an ancient castle at midnight, terrible with wind and lightning, for suddenly they were not bright nor cheery, but black with tragedy.

There was no manner of use in trying to cajole her. She could never understand how he hated the confinement of his dental office; she would say, “Why, you get the chance of meeting all sorts of nice, interesting people, while I have to stay home,” and not perceive that he did not want to meet nice, interesting people. He wanted silence and the smell of earth! And he was under her spell as he had been under his father’s. Only violently could he break it. He spoke softly enough, looking at the giddy marble of the soda counter, but he spoke sternly:

“Look here, May. This is our chance. You bet your sweet life we’re going to be sensible and not blow in our stake! And we’re not going to blow it in on a lot of clothes and a lot of fool bridge parties for a lot of fool folks that don’t care one red hoot about us except what they get out of us! For that matter, if we were going to stay on in New York—”

“Which we most certainly are, young man!”

“Will you listen to me? I inherited this dough, not you! Gee, I don’t want to be mean, May, but you got to listen to reason, and as I’m saying, if we were going to stay in the city, the first thing I’d spend money for would be a new dental engine—an electric one.

“Need it like the mischief—lose patients when they see me pumping that old one and think I ain’t up-to-date—which I ain’t, but that’s no skin off their nose!”

Even the volatile Mabelle was silent at the unprecedented length and vigor of his oration.

“But we’re not going to stay. No, sir! We’re going back to the old farm, and the kids will be brought up in the fresh air instead of a lot of alleys. Go back and farm it—”

She exploded then, and as she spoke she looked at him with eyes hot with hatred, the first hatred he had ever known in her:

“Are you crazy? Go back to that hole? Have my kids messing around a lot of manure and dirty animals and out working in the hayfield like a lot of cattle? And attend a little one-room school with a boob for a teacher? And play with a lot of nitwit brats? Not on your life they won’t! I’ve got some ambition for ’em, even if you haven’t!”

“Why, May, I thought you liked Vermont and the farm! You were crazy about it on our honeymoon, and you said—”

“I did not! I hated it even then. I just said I liked it to make you happy. That stifling little bedroom, and kerosene lamps, and bugs, and no bathroom, and those fools of farmers in their shirt sleeves—Oh, it was fierce! If you go, you go without the kids and me! I guess I can still earn a living! And I guess there’s still plenty of other men would like to marry me when I divorce you! And I mean it!”