hours of three and five, when the market wagons were to be seen moving toward Chicago. Klaas Pool at dinner that noon had spoken of Selina’s contemplated trip with a mingling of pity and disapproval.
“It ain’t decent a woman should drive to market.”
Mrs. Klaas Pool (they still spoke of her as the Widow Paarlenberg) smiled her slippery crooked smile. “What could you expect! Look how she’s always acted.”
Klaas did not follow this. He was busy with his own train of thought. “It don’t seem hardly possible. Time she come here school teacher I drove her out and she was like a little robin or what, set up on the seat. She says, I remember like yesterday, cabbages was beautiful. I bet she learned different by this time.”
But she hadn’t. So little had Selina learned in these past eleven years that now, having loaded the wagon in the yard she surveyed it with more sparkle in her eye than High Prairie would have approved in a widow of little more than a week. They had picked and bunched only the best of the late crop—the firmest reddest radishes, the roundest juiciest beets; the carrots that tapered a good seven inches from base to tip; kraut cabbages of the drumhead variety that were flawless green balls; firm juicy spears of cucumber; cauliflower (of her own planting; Pervus had opposed it) that looked like a bride’s bouquet. Selina stepped back now and regarded this riot of crimson and green, of white and gold and purple.
