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202 down. His brown shirt was wet where his suspenders gripped his shoulders, and his face, under a wide straw hat which he did not remove, was unshaven and streaked with dust.

“Go ahead and finish your supper,” he cried. “Having a wife with an electric is next thing to having no wife at all. How they do like to roll around! I’ve been mighty blamed careful to see that Susie never learned to drive a car. See here, Claude, how soon do you figure you’ll be able to let me have the thrasher? My wheat will begin to sprout in the shock pretty soon. Do you guess your father would be willing to work on Sunday, if I helped you, to let the machine off a day earlier?”

“I’m afraid not. Mother wouldn’t like it. We never have done that, even when we were crowded.”

“Well, I think I’ll go over and have a talk with your mother. If she could look inside my wheat shocks, maybe I could convince her it’s pretty near a case of your neighbour’s ox falling into a pit on the Sabbath day.”

“That’s a good idea. She’s always reasonable.”

Leonard rose. “What’s the news?”

“The Germans have torpedoed an English passenger ship, the Arabic; coming this way, too.”

“That’s all right,” Leonard declared. “Maybe Americans will stay at home now, and mind their own business. I don’t care how they chew each other up over there, not a bit! I’d as soon one got wiped off the map as another.”

“Your grandparents were English people, weren’t they?”

“That’s a long while ago. Yes, my grandmother wore a cap and little white curls, and I tell Susie I wouldn’t mind if the baby turned out to have my grandmother’s skin. She had the finest complexion I ever saw.”