So Ruth was not only an active partner but there was another side to the game that appealed to her. "The thing I like about our life down here," she said to me one night, "is the chance it gives me to get something of myself into every single detail of the home." I didn't know what she meant because it seemed to me that was just what she had always done. But she shook her head when I said so. "No," she said. "Not the way I can now." "Well, you didn't have a servant and must have done whatever was done," I said. "I didn't have time to pick out the food for the table," she said. "I had to order it of the grocery man. I didn't have time to make as many of your clothes as I wanted. Why I didn't even have time to plan." "If anyone had told me that a woman could do any more than you then were doing, I should have laughed at them," I said. "You and the boy weren't all my own then," she said. "I had to waste a great deal of time on things outside the house. Sometimes it used to make me feel as though you were just one of the neighbors, Billy." I began to see what she meant. But she certainly found now just as much time if not more to spare on the women and babies all around us. "They aren't neighbors," she said. "They are friends." I suppose she felt like that because what she did for them wasn't just wasted energy like an evening at cards. But she went back again and again, as though it were a song, to this notion that our new home was all her own. "You may think me a pig, Billy," she said. "But I like it. I like to pick out all myself, every single potato you and the boy eat; I like to pick out every leaf of lettuce, every apple. It makes me feel as though I was doing something for you." "Good land--" I said. But she wouldn't let me finish. "No, Billy," she said. "You don't understand what all that means to me--how it makes me a part of you and Dick as I never was before. And I like to think that in everything you wear there's a stitch of mine right close to you. And that when you and the boy lie down at night I'm touching you because I made everything clean for you with my own hands." It makes my throat grow lumpy even now when I remember the eager, half-ashamed way she looked up into my eyes as she said this. Lord, sometimes she made me feel like a little child and other times she made me feel like a giant. But whichever way she made me feel at the moment, she always left me wishing that I had in me every good thing a man can have so that I might be half way worthy of her. There are times when a fellow knows that as a man he doesn't count for much as compared with any woman. And with such a woman as Ruth--well, God knows I tried to do my best in those days and have tried to do that ever since, but it makes me ache to think how little I've been able to give her of all she deserves.