June’s magic turned Whitewater to a paradise. Crystal mornings gradually warming until sundown; gentle showers at night to freshen herbage and start a million planted seeds; blossoms, bees, buds, blue skies--all exquisitely balanced designs in June’s enchanted tapestry--and nothing so far to mar the fabric--no late and malignant frost, no early drouth, broken violently by thunderbolt and deluge; no hail; no heavy winds to dry and sear; nothing untoward in the herd,--no milk-fever, no abortion, no terrifying emergency at night. The only things to irritate Odell were the letters from Eris. They aroused in him the dumb, familiar anger of Fanny’s time. * * * * * But after the first week in July there were no longer any letters from Eris. The girl had written two or three times during June, striving to explain herself, to make him understand her need of doing as she was doing, the necessity that some of her own money be sent her. Her last letter arrived about the beginning of that dreadful era of unprecedented heat and drouth which ushered in July and which caused that summer to be long remembered in the Old World as well as in the New. Odell’s refusal to send her a single penny, and his repeated summons for her return had finally silenced Eris. No more letters came. Odell’s attitude silenced Mazie, too, whose primitive sense of duty was to her man first of all. Sometimes she ventured to hope that Eris might, somehow, be successful. Oftener a comforting belief reassured her that the girl would soon return to material comforts and female duties, which were all Mazie comprehended of earthly happiness. Odell’s refusal to send Eris her money and her clothes worried Mazie when she had time to think. But what could she do? Man ruled Mazie’s universe. It was proper that he should. All her life she had had to submit to him,--she had to cook for him, wash, sew, mend, care for his habitation, bear his children, fed them, wean them, and, in the endless sequence again, cook, wash, iron, sew, mend for these men-children which she had borne her man. And it was proper. It was the way of the world. Of heaven, too, perhaps. God himself was masculine.... She sometimes wondered whether there really was any rest there for female angels.... Of what other women desired and did,--of aspiration, spiritual and intellectual discontent, Mazie knew nothing. For her nothing desirable existed beyond the barbed wire. And yet, without at all understanding Eris, always she had felt an odd sympathy for the girl’s irregularities--had recognized that Fanny’s child was different from herself, from her offspring--from other women’s children. But the underlying motive that had sent Eris forth was quite beyond Mazie’s ken. The resurrection of her sex came too early for her who had not yet died.