Selina felt suddenly friendly and happy. “Do tell me which ones will and which won’t.”
“Geertje goes to school. Jozina goes to school. Roelf works by the farm.”
“How old is Roelf?” She was being school teacherly again.
“Twelve! And no longer at school! But why not!”
“Don’t you think he ought to go to school?”
Having begun, she could not go back. “Doesn’t your wife want Roelf to go to school any more?”
She gathered herself together; hurled herself behind the next question. “Then why _doesn’t_ he go to school, for pity’s sake!”
Klaas Pool’s pale blue eyes were fixed on the spot between the horse’s ears. His face was serene, placid, patient.
She wondered about Roelf. Would he be a furtive, slinking boy, like Smike? Geertje and Jozina. Geertje—Gertrude, of course. Jozina? Josephine. Maartje?—m-m-m-m—Martha, probably. At any rate, it was going to be interesting. It was going to be wonderful! Suppose she had gone to Vermont and become a dried apple!
Dusk was coming on. The lake mist came drifting across the prairie and hung, a pearly haze, over the frost-nipped stubble and the leafless trees. It caught the last light in the sky, and held it, giving to fields, trees, black earth, to the man seated stolidly beside the girl, and to the face of the girl herself an opalescent glow very wonderful to see. Selina, seeing it, opened her lips to exclaim again; and then, remembering, closed them. She had learned her first lesson in High Prairie.
The Klaas Pools lived in a typical High Prairie house. They had passed a score like it in the dusk. These sturdy Holland-Americans had built here in Illinois after the pattern of the squat houses that dot the lowlands about Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Rotterdam. A row of pollards stood stiffly by the roadside. As they turned in at the yard Selina’s eye was caught by the glitter of glass. The house was many-windowed, the panes the size of pocket-handkerchiefs. Even in the dusk Selina thought she had never seen windows sparkle so. She did not then know that spotless window-panes were a mark of social standing in High Prairie. Yard and dwelling had a geometrical neatness like that of a toy house in a set of playthings. The effect was marred by a clothes-line hung with a dado of miscellaneous wash—a pair of faded overalls, a shirt, socks, a man’s drawers carefully patched and now bellying grotesquely in the breeze like a comic tramp turned bacchanal. Selina was to know this frieze of nether garments as a daily decoration in the farm-wife’s yard.