“Your people farmers!” Surprised, she looked at his well-cut clothes, his slim, strong, unmarked hands, his smart shoes and cap. “Why, so are mine. Iowa.” She pronounced it Ioway. “I lived on the farm all my life till I was twenty-seven. I always wanted to go away to school, but we never had the money and I couldn’t come to town to earn because I was the oldest, and Ma was sickly after Emma—that’s the youngest—there are nine of us—was born. Ma was anxious I should go and Pa was willing, but it couldn’t be. No fault of theirs. One year the summer would be so hot, with no rain hardly from spring till fall, and the corn would just dry up on the stalks, like paper. The next year it would be so wet the seed would rot in the ground. Ma died when I was twenty-six. The kids were all pretty well grown up by that time. Pa married again in a year and I went to Des Moines to work. I stayed there six years but I didn’t save much on account of my brother. He was kind of wild. He had come to Des Moines, too, after Pa married. He and Aggie—that’s the second wife—didn’t get along. I came to Chicago about five years ago. . . . I’ve done all kinds of work, I guess, except digging in a coal mine. I’d have done that if I’d had to.” She told him all this ingenuously, simply. Dirk felt drawn toward her, sorry for her. His was a nature quick to sympathy. Something she said now stirred him while it bewildered him a little, too. “You can’t have any idea what it means to me to be here . . . All those years! I used to dream about it. Even now it seems to me it can’t be true. I’m conscious of my surroundings all the time and yet I can’t believe them. You know, like when you are asleep and dream about something beautiful, and then wake up and find it’s actually true. I get a thrill out of just being here. ‘I’m crossing the campus,’ I say to myself. ‘I’m a student—a girl student—in Midwest University and now I’m crossing the campus of my university to go to a class.’” Her face was very greasy and earnest and fine. “Well, that’s great,” Dirk replied, weakly. “That’s cer’nly great.” He told his mother about her. Usually he went home on Friday nights to stay until Monday morning. His first Monday-morning class was not until ten. Selina was deeply interested and stirred. “Do you think she’d spend some Saturday and Sunday here with us on the farm? She could come with you on Friday and go back Sunday night if she wanted to. Or stay until Monday morning and go back with you. There’s the spare room, all quiet and cool. She could do as she liked. I’d give her cream and all the fresh fruit and vegetables she wanted. And Meena would bake one of her fresh cocoanut cakes. I’d have Adam bring a fresh cocoanut from South Water Street.”