Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him. He had literally to fight his way free of it. From So Big (of fond and infantile derivation) it had been condensed into Sobig. And Sobig DeJong, in all i...

Selina had thought herself lucky to get the Dutch school at High Prairie, ten miles outside Chicago. Thirty dollars a month! She was to board at the house of Klaas Pool, the truck farmer. It was Augus...

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...

Every morning throughout November it was the same. At six o’clock: “Miss Peake! Oh, Miss Peake!” “I’m up!” Selina would call in what she meant to be a gay voice, through chattering teeth. “You better ...

High Prairie swains failed to find Selina alluring. She was too small, too pale and fragile for their robust taste. Naturally, her coming had been an event in this isolated community. She would have b...

The evenings turned out to be Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Supper was over by six-thirty in the Pool household. Pervus was there by seven, very clean as to shirt, his hair brushed till it shone...

They were married the following May, just two months later. The High Prairie school year practically ended with the appearance of the first tender shoots of green that meant onions, radishes, and spin...

By October High Prairie Housewives told each other that Mrs. Pervus DeJong was “expecting.” Dirk DeJong was born in the bedroom off the sitting room on the fifteenth day of March, of a bewildered, som...

Dirk was eight; Little Sobig DeJong, in a suit made of bean-sacking sewed together by his mother. A brown blond boy with mosquito bites on his legs and his legs never still. Nothing of the dreamer abo...

Perhaps the most poignant and touching feature of the days that followed was not the sight of this stricken giant, lying majestic and aloof in his unwonted black; nor of the boy Dirk, mystified but el...

It would be enchanting to be able to record that Selina, next day, had phenomenal success, disposing of her carefully bunched wares to great advantage, driving smartly off up Halsted Street toward Hig...

The best thing for Dirk. The best thing for Dirk. It was the phrase that repeated itself over and over in Selina’s speech during the days that followed. Julie Arnold was all for taking him into her gr...

If those vague characteristics called (variously) magnetism, manner, grace, distinction, attractiveness, fascination, go to make up that nebulous quality known as charm; and if the possessor of that q...

Throughout Dirk’s Freshman year there were, for him, no heartening, informal, mellow talks before the wood-fire in the book-lined study of some professor whose wisdom was such a mixture of classic lor...

“Run along!” said Selina, when he called her on the farm telephone. “It’ll do you good. You’ve been as grumpy as a gander for weeks. How about shirts? And you left one pair of flannel tennis pants out...

As it turned out, Dirk was spared the necessity of worrying about the fit of his next dinner coat for the following year and a half. His coat, during that period, was a neat olive drab as was that of ...

Between these girls and the girls that worked in his office there existed a similarity that struck and amused Dirk. He said, “Take a letter, Miss Roach,” to a slim young creature as exquisite as the g...

Paula had a scheme for interesting women in bond buying. It was a good scheme. She suggested it so that Dirk thought he had thought of it. Dirk was head now of the bond department in the Great Lakes T...

The things that had mattered so vitally didn’t seem to be important, somehow, now. The people who had seemed so desirable had become suddenly insignificant. The games he had played appeared silly game...

General Goguet and Roelf Pool had been in Chicago one night and part of a day. Dirk had not met them⁠—was to meet them at Paula’s dinner that evening. He was curious about Pool but not particularly in...

They had had tea in the farm sitting room and Dallas had made a little moaning over the beauty of the Dutch lustre set. Selina had entertained them with the shining air of one who is robed in silk and...