There was a tractor now, of course; a phonograph with expensive records, so that Caruso and McCormack and Elman were household words; a sturdy, middle-class automobile, in which Bella lolled red-faced in a lacy and beribboned boudoir cap when they drove into town. On a Saturday afternoon you saw more boudoir caps skimming up and down the main street in Commercial than you might see in a century of French farces. As Ben Westerveld had prospered his shrewish wife had reaped her benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an ice house, a commodious porch, a washing machine, even a crude bathroom. But Bella remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly, surely, the effect of thirty-odd years of nagging was beginning to tell on Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold. Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, but slack, like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and crying down with the rich. They had two children. Minnie wrote of them, and of the delights of city life. Movies every night. Halsted Street just around the corner. The big stores. State Street. The L took you downtown in no time. Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld, after one of those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a terrible termagant. * * * * * When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't dream that a world would be clamouring for hogs and wheat for four long years. When the time came he had them, and sold them fabulously. But wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike with seven other farm boys from the district left for the nearest training camp that was to fit them for France and war. Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics. Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that day. When the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on the quick, light step began to lag a little. He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone. There were no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice seemed never to stop its plaint.