“Well, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am, I was only doing my duty. How cud I know the lady was a friend of yours. Sure, I——” He surveyed Selina, cart, jaded horses, wilted vegetables. “Well, how _cud_ I, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am!” “And why not!” demanded Julie with superb unreasonableness. “Why not, I’d like to know. Do get along with you.” He got along, a defeated officer of the law, and a bitter. And now it was Julie who surveyed Selina, cart, Dirk, jaded horses, wilted left-over vegetables. “Selina, whatever in the world! What are you doing with——” She caught sight of Selina’s absurd boots then and she began to cry again. At that Selina’s overwrought nerves snapped and she began to laugh, hysterically. It frightened Julie, that laughter. “Selina, don’t! Come in the house with me. What are you laughing at! Selina!” With shaking finger Selina was pointing at the vegetables that lay tumbled at her feet. “Do you see that cabbage, Julie? Do you remember how I used to despise Mrs. Tebbitt’s because she used to have boiled cabbage on Monday nights?” “That’s nothing to laugh at, is it? Stop laughing this minute, Selina Peake!” “I’ll stop. I’ve stopped now. I was just laughing at my ignorance. Sweat and blood and health and youth go into every cabbage. Did you know that, Julie? One doesn’t despise them as food, knowing that. . . . Come, climb down, Dirk. Here’s a lady mother used to know—oh, years and years ago, when she was a girl. Thousands of years ago.” XII The best thing for Dirk. The best thing for Dirk. It was the phrase that repeated itself over and over in Selina’s speech during the days that followed. Julie Arnold was all for taking him into her gray stone house, dressing him like Lord Fauntleroy and sending him to the north-side private school attended by Eugene, her boy, and Pauline, her girl. In this period of bewilderment and fatigue Julie had attempted to take charge of Selina much as she had done a dozen years before at the time of Simeon Peake’s dramatic death. And now, as then, she pressed into service her wonder-working father and bounden slave, August Hempel. Her husband she dismissed with affectionate disregard. “Michael’s all right,” she had said on that day of their first meeting, “if you tell him what’s to be done. He’ll always do it. But Pa’s the one that thinks of things. He’s like a general, and Michael’s the captain. Well, now, Pa’ll be out to-morrow and I’ll probably come with him. I’ve got a committee meeting, but I can easily——” “You said—did you say your father would be out to-morrow! Out where?” “To your place. Farm.” “But why should he? It’s a little twenty-five-acre truck farm, and half of it under water a good deal of the time.” “Pa’ll find a use for it, never fear. He won’t say much, but he’ll think of things. And then everything will be all right.” “It’s miles. Miles. Way out in High Prairie.”