Do you remember Aunt Harriet who always wept when she read _The Isles of Greece_? She didn't even know where they were, and had never been east of Salem. But all the Woodberrys were like that. Dinky-Dunk came in and found me crying to-day, for the second time in one week. He made such valiantly ponderous efforts to cheer me up, poor boy, and shook his head and said I'd soon be an improvement on the Snider System, which is a system of irrigation by spraying overnight from pipes! My nerves don't seem so good as they were. The winter's so long. I'm already counting the days to spring. _Thursday the Twenty-fifth_ Dinky-Dunk has concluded that I'm too much alone; he's been worrying over it. I can tell that. I try not to be moody, but sometimes I simply can't help it. Yesterday afternoon he drove up to Casa Grande, proud as Punch, with a little black and white kitten in the crook of his arm. He'd covered twenty-eight miles of trail for that kitten! It's to be my companion. But the kitten's as lonesome as I am, and has been crying, and nearly driving me crazy. _Tuesday the Second_ The weather has been bad, but winter is slipping away. Dinky-Dunk has been staying in from his work, these mornings, helping me about the house. He is clumsy and slow, and has broken two or three of the dishes. But I hate to say anything; his eyes get so tragic. He declares that as soon as the trails are passable he's going to have a woman to help me, that this sort of thing can't go on any longer. He imagines it's merely the monotony of housework that is making my nerves so bad. Yesterday morning I was drying the dishes and Dinky-Dunk was washing. I found the second spoon with egg on it. I don't know why it was, but that trivial streak of yellow along the edge of a spoon suddenly seemed to enrage me. It became monumental, an emblem of vague incapabilities which I would have to face until the end of my days. I flung that spoon back in the dish-pan. Then I turned on my husband and called out to him, in a voice that didn't quite seem like my own, "O God, can't you wash 'em _clean_? Can't you wash 'em clean?" I even think I ran up and down the room and pretty well made what Percival Benson would call "a bally ass" of myself. Dinky-Dunk didn't even answer me. But he dried his hands and got his things and went outdoors, to the stables, I suppose. His face was as colorless as it could possibly get. I felt sorry; but it was too late. And my sniffling didn't do any good. And it startled me, as I sat thinking things over, to realize that I'd lost my sense of humor. _Thursday the Fourth_