“You can’t do anything here,” said Jennie. “You’ve been a farm-hand for fifteen years ... and you always will be unless you pull yourself loose. Even a girl can make a place for herself if she doesn’t marry and leaves the farm. You’re twenty-eight years old.”

“It’s all wrong!” said Jim gently. “The farm ought to be the place for the best sort of career—I love the soil!”

“I’ve been teaching for only two years, and they say I’ll be nominated for county superintendent if I’ll take it. Of course I won’t—it seems silly—but if it were you, now, it would be a first step to a life that leads to something.”

“Mother and I can live on my wages—and the garden and chickens and the cow,” said 6 Jim. “After I received my teacher’s certificate, I tried to work out some way of doing the same thing on a country teacher’s wages. I couldn’t. It doesn’t seem right.”

6

Jim rose and after pacing back and forth sat down again, a little closer to Jennie. Jennie moved away to the extreme end of the bench, and the shrinking away of Jim as if he had been repelled by some sort of negative magnetism showed either sensitiveness or temper.

“It seems as if it ought to be possible,” said Jim, “for a man to do work on the farm, or in the rural schools, that would make him a livelihood. If he is only a field-hand, it ought to be possible for him to save money and buy a farm.”

“Pa’s land is worth two hundred dollars an acre,” said Jennie. “Six months of your wages for an acre—even if you lived on nothing.”

“No,” he assented, “it can’t be done. And the other thing can’t, either. There ought to be such conditions that a teacher could make a living.”

“They do,” said Jennie, “if they can live at home during vacations. I do.” 7

7

“But a man teaching in the country ought to be able to marry.”

“Marry!” said Jennie, rather unfeelingly, I think. “You marry!” Then after remaining silent for nearly a minute, she uttered the syllable—without the utterance of which this narrative would not have been written. “You marry! Humph!”

Jim Irwin rose from the bench tingling with the insult he found in her tone. They had been boy-and-girl sweethearts in the old days at the Woodruff schoolhouse down the road, 

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