“There’s Jim’s automobile now.  They’re headin’ for Prescott, too.  Kitty’s drivin’, I reckon.  I tell Stella that that machine and Kitty’s learnin’ to run the thing is about all the returns that Jim can show for the money he’s spent in educatin’ her.  I don’t mean,” he added, with a quick look at Patches, as though he feared to be misunderstood, “that Kitty’s one of them good-for-nothin’ butterfly girls.  She ain’t that by a good deal.  Why, she was raised right here in this neighborhood, an’ we love her the same as if she was our own.  She can cook a meal or make a dress ‘bout as well as her mother, an’ does it, too; an’ she can ride a horse or throw a rope better’n some punchers I’ve seen, but—­” The Dean stopped, seemingly for want of words to express exactly his thought.

“It seems to me,” offered Patches abstractedly, “that education, as we call it, is a benefit only when it adds to one’s life.  If schooling or culture, or whatever you choose to term it, is permitted to rob one of the fundamental and essential elements of life, it is most certainly an evil.”

“That’s the idea,” exclaimed the Dean, with frank admiration for his companion’s ability to say that which he himself thought.  “You say it like a book.  But that’s it.  It ain’t the learnin’ an’ all the stuff that Kitty got while she was at school that’s worryin’ us.  It’s what she’s likely to lose through gettin’ ’em.  This here modern, down-to-the-minute, higher livin’, loftier sphere, intellectual supremacy idea is all right if folks’ll just keep their feet on the ground.

“You take Stella an’ me now.  I know we’re old fashioned an’ slow an’ all that, an’ we’ve seen a lot of hardships since we was married over in Skull Valley where she was born an’ raised.  She was just a girl then, an’ I was only a kid, punchin’ steers for a livin’.  I suppose we’ve seen about as hard times as anybody.  At least that’s what they would be called now.  But, hell, we didn’t think nothin’ of it then; we was happy, sir, and we’ve been happy for over forty year.  I tell you, sir, we’ve lived—­just lived every minute, and that’s a blamed sight more than a lot of these higher-cultured, top-lofty, half-dead couples that marry and separate, and separate and marry again now-a-days can say.

“No, sir, ’tain’t what a man gets that makes him rich; it’s what he keeps.  And these folks that are swoppin’ the old-fashioned sort of love that builds homes and raises families and lets man and wife work together, an’ meet trouble together, an’ be happy together, an’ grow old bein’ happy together—­if they’re swoppin’ all that for these here new, down-to-date ideas of such things, they’re makin’ a damned poor bargain, accordin’ to my way of thinkin’.  There is such a thing, sir, as educatin’ a man or woman plumb out of reach of happiness.