"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold."If you want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the back yard and grow something? You was crazy about it on the farm."His face flushed a slow, dull red at that.He could not explain to her that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to gardening-- he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.
On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the place.Tokyo and Rome and Gallipoli came to him.He saw beautiful tiger-women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding forms of young men with cleft chins.He was only mildly interested.He talked to anyone who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy man.He talked to the barber, the grocer, the druggist, the streetcar conductor, the milkman, the iceman.But the price of wheat did not interest these gentlemen.They did not know that the price of wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world.
"Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop, with about 917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to win the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say.""Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff.But the queer part of it is that Farmer Ben was right.
Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid.It gave her many hours of freedom for gadding and gossiping.
"Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? I got to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired and mean- acting if I take her along.Ma's going with me."He loved the feel of Pearlie's small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist.He called her "little feller," and fed her forbidden dainties.His big brown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning hertiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundred tender offices.He was playing a sort of game with himself, pretending this was Dike become a baby again.Once the pair managed to get over to Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day looking at the animals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature railway.