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"Some way their big houses have a look like a stable when you get close to ’em," Claude said to ‘Cindy once. "Their women work so much in the field they don’t have any time to fix up–the way you do. I don’t believe in women workin’ in the fields. " He said this looking ‘Cindy in the face. "My wife needn’t set her foot outdoors ‘less she’s a mind to. "

"Oh, you can talk," replied the girl scornfully, "but you’d be like the rest of ’em. " But she was glad that she had on a clean collar and apron–if it was ironing day.

What Claude would have said further ‘Cindy could not divine, for her mother called her away, as she generally did when she saw her daughter lingering too long with the creamery man. Claude was not considered a suitable match for Lucindy Kennedy, whose father owned one of the finest farms in the coulee. Worldly considerations hold in Molasses Gap as well as in Bluff Siding and Tyre.

But Claude gave little heed to these moods in Mrs. Kennedy. If ‘Cindy sputtered, he laughed; and if she smiled, he rode on whistling till he came to old man Haldeman’s, who owned the whole lower half of Molasses Gap, and had one ummarried daughter, who thought Claude one of the handsomest men in the world. She was always at the gate to greet him as he drove up, and forced sections of cake and pieces of gooseberry pie upon him each day.

"She’s good enough for a Dutchman," Claude said of her, "but I hate to see a woman go around looking as if her clothes would drop off if it rained on her. And on Sundays, when she dresses up, she looks like a boy rigged out in some girl’s cast-off duds. "

This was pretty hard on Nina. She was tall and lank and sandy, with small blue eyes, her limbs were heavy, and she did wear her Sunday clothes badly, but she was a good, generous soul and very much in love with the creamery man. She was not very clean, but then she could not help that; the dust of the field is no respecter of sex. No, she was not lovely, but she was the only daughter of old Ernest Haldeman, and the old man was not very strong.

Claude was the daily bulletin of the Gap. He knew whose cow died the night before, who was at the strawberry dance, and all about Abe Anderson’s night in jail up at the Siding. If his coming was welcome to the Kennedy’s, who took the Bluff Siding Gimlet and the county paper, how much the more cordial ought his greeting to be at Haldeman’s, where they only took the Milwaukee Weekly Freiheit.

Nina in her poor way had longings and aspirations. She wanted to marry "a Yankee," and not one of her own kind. She had a little schooling obtained at the small brick shed under the towering cottonwood tree at the corner of her father’s farm; but her life had been one of hard work and mighty little play. Her parents spoke in German about the farm, and could speak English only very brokenly. Her only brother had adventured into the foreign parts of Pine County and had been killed in a sawmill. Her life was lonely and hard.

She had suitors among the Germans, plenty of them, but she had a disgust of them–considered as possible husbands–and though she went to their beery dances occasionally, she had always in her mind the ease, lightness, and color of Claude. She knew that the Yankee girls did not work in the fields–even the Norwegian girls seldom did so now, they worked out in town–but she had been brought up to hoe and pull weeds from her childhood, and her father and mother considered it good for her, and being a gentle and obedient child, she still continued to do as she was told. Claude pitied the girl, and used to talk with her, during his short stay, in his cheeriest manner.