difference to him who I am than who cooks for him."

Not that Martin had been unkind, except negatively. Intuitively,
Rose understood that their first evening and night foreshadowed
their whole lives. Not in what Martin would do, but in what he
would not do, would lie her heartaches. Yet in her sad
reflections there was no bitterness toward him; he had
disappointed her, but perhaps it was only because she had taught
herself to expect something rare, even spiritual, from marriage.
Her idealism had played her a trick.

With the quiet relinquishment of this long-cherished dream,
eagerness for the realization of an even more precious one took
possession of her. She comforted herself with the thought that
maybe life had brought Martin merely as a door to the citadel
which looms, sparkling with dancing sunlight, in the midst of
mysterious shadows. Motherhood--she would feel as if she were in
another world. Out of all this disappointment would come her
ultimate happiness.

Always struggling toward happiness, she was cheered too as the
foundation for the house progressed. Everything would be so
different, she told herself, once they were in their pretty new
home. It was true she had given up a concrete floor for her
cellar, but she had seen at once the good sense of having the
concrete in the barn instead. Martin was right. While it would
have been nice in the house, of course, it would not have begun
to be the constant blessing to herself that it would now be to
him. How much easier it would make keeping the barn clean! Why,
it was almost a duty in a dairy barn to have such a floor and