I've been wondering if Dinky-Dunk is going to fall in love with Olga. Yesterday I saw him staring at her neck. She's the type of woman that would really make the right sort of wilderness wife. She seems an integral part of the prairie, broad-bosomed, fecund, opulent. And she's so placid and large and soft-spoken and easy to live with. She has none of my moods and tantrums.
Her corsets came to-day, and I showed her how to put them on. She is incontinently proud of them, but in my judgment they only make her ridiculous. It's as foolish as putting a French toque on one of her oxen. The skin of Olga's great shoulders is as smooth and creamy as a baby's. I have been watching her eyes. They are not a dark blue, but in a strong side-light they seem deep wells of light, layer on layer of azure. And she is mysterious to me, calmly and magnificently inscrutable. And I once thought her an uncouth animal. But she is a great help. She has planted rows and rows of sweet peas all about Casa Grande and is starting to make a kitchen garden, which she's going to fence off and look after with her own hands. It will be twice the size of Olie's. But I do hope she doesn't ever grow into something mysterious to my Dinky-Dunk. This morning she said I ought to work in the garden, that the more I kept on my feet the better it would be for me later on.
As for Dinky-Dunk, the poor boy is working himself gaunt. Yet tired as he is, he tries to read a few pages of something worth while every night. Sometimes we take turns in reading. Last night he handed me over his volume of Spencer with a pencil mark along one passage. This passage said: "Intellectual activity in women is liable to be diminished after marriage by that antagonism between individuation and reproduction everywhere operative throughout the organic world." I don't know why, but that passage made me as hot as a hornet. In the background of my brain I carried some vague memory of George Eliot once catching this same philosophizing Spencer fishing with a composite fly, and, remarking on his passion for generalizations, declaring that he even fished with a generalization. So I could afford to laugh. "Spencer's idea of a tragedy," I told Dinky-Dunk, "is a deduction killed by a fact!" And again I smiled my Mona-Lisa smile. "And I'm going to be one of the facts!" I proudly proclaimed.
Dinky-Dunk, after thinking this over, broke into a laugh. "You know, Gee-Gee," he solemnly announced, "there are times when you seem almost clever!" But I wasn't clever in this case, for it was hours later before I saw the trap which Dinky-Dunk had laid for me!
