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“`For Gawd’s sakes, Lil, does your husband beat you?’

“`Steve!’ she shrieks, `beat me! You must be crazy!’

“`Well, if he don’t, he ought to. Those clothes are grounds for divorce,’ I says.

“Mr. Guy Peel, it took me just four weeks to get wise to the fact that the way to cure homesickness is to go home. I spent those four weeks trying to revolutionize my sister-in-law’s house, dress, kids, husband, wall paper and parlor carpet. I took all the doilies from under the ornaments and spoke my mind on the subject of the hand-painted lamp, and Lil hates me for it yet, and will to her dying day. I fitted three dresses for her, and made her get some corsets that she’ll never wear. They have roast pork for dinner on Sundays, and they never go to the theater, and they like bread pudding, and they’re happy. I wasn’t. They treated me fine, and it was home, all right, but not my home. It was the same, but I was different. Eleven years away from anything makes it shrink, if you know what I mean. I guess maybe you do. I remember that I used to think that the Grand View Hotel was a regular little oriental palace that was almost too luxurious to be respectable, and that the traveling men who stopped there were gods, and just to prance past the hotel after supper had the Atlantic City board walk looking like a back alley on a rainy night. Well, everything had sort of shriveled up just like that. The popcorn gave me indigestion, and I burned the skin off my nose popping it. Kneading bread gave me the backache, and the blamed stuff wouldn’t raise right. I got so I was crazy to hear the roar of an L train, and the sound of a crossing policeman’s whistle. I got to thinking how Michigan Avenue looks, downtown, with the lights shining down on the asphalt, and all those people eating in the swell hotels, and the autos, and the theater crowds and the windows, and–well, I’m back. Glad I went? You said it. Because it made me so darned glad to get back. I’ve found out one thing, and it’s a great little lesson when you get it learned. Most of us are where we are because we belong there, and if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be. Say, that does sound mixed, don’t it? But it’s straight. Now you tell yours.”

“I think you’ve said it all,” began Guy Peel. “It’s queer, isn’t it, how twelve years of America will spoil one for afternoon tea, and yew trees, and tapestries, and lace caps, and roses. The mater was glad to see me, but she said I smelled woolly. They think a Navajo blanket is a thing the Indians wear on the war path, and they don’t know whether Texas is a state, or a mineral water. It was slow–slow. About the time they were taking afternoon tea, I’d be reckoning how the boys would be rounding up the cattle for the night, and about the time we’d sit down to dinner something seemed to whisk the dinner table, and the flowers, and the men and women in evening clothes right out of sight, like magic, and I could see the boys stretched out in front of the bunk house after their supper of bacon, and beans, and biscuit, and coffee. They’d be smoking their pipes that smelled to Heaven, and further, and Wing would be squealing one of his creepy old Chink songs out in the kitchen, and the sky would be–say, Miss Meron, did you ever see the night sky, out West? Purple, you know, and soft as soap- suds, and so near that you want to reach up and touch it with your hand. Toward the end my mother used to take me off in a corner and tell me that I hadn’t spoken a word to the little girl that I had taken in to dinner, and that if I couldn’t forget my uncouth western ways for an hour or two, at least, perhaps I’d better not try to mingle with civilized people. I discovered that home isn’t always the place where you were born and bred. Home is the place where your everyday clothes are, and where somebody, or something needs you. They didn’t need me over there in England. Lord no! I was sick for the sight of a Navajo blanket. My shack’s glowing with them. And my books needed me, and the boys, and the critters, and Kate.”