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 “It isn’t!” cried Selina, “It isn’t! The book says clay loam is all right for cabbages, peas, and beans. It tells you how. It tells you how!” She was like a frantic little fly darting and pricking him on to accelerate the stolid sluggishness of his slow plodding gait.

Having begun, she plunged on. “We ought to have two horses to haul the wagon to market. It would save you hours of time that you could spend on the place. Two horses, and a new wagon, green and red, like Klaas Pool’s.”

Pervus stared straight ahead down the road between his horse’s ears much as Klaas Pool had done so maddeningly on Selina’s first ride on the Halsted road. “Fine talk. Fine talk.”

“It isn’t talk. It’s plans. You've got to plan.”

“Fine talk. Fine talk.”

“Oh!” Selina beat her knee with an impotent fist.

It was the nearest they had ever come to quarrelling. It would seem that Pervus had the best of the argument, for when two years had passed the west sixteen was still a boggy clay mass, and unprolific; and the old house stared out shabby and paintless, at the dense willows by the roadside.

They slept that night in one of the twenty-five-cent rooming houses. Rather, Pervus slept. The woman lay awake, listening to the city noises that had become strange in her ears; staring out into the purple-black oblong that was the open window, until that oblong became gray. She wept a little, perhaps. But in the morning Pervus might have noted (if he had been