We were being cannonaded with shrapnel from the skies. We were being

deluged with blocks of ice almost the size of duck-eggs. So thunderous

was the noise that I had no remembrance when the window-panes on the

west side of the house were broken. It wasn't, in fact, until I beheld

the wind and water blowing in through the broken sashes that I

awakened to what had happened. But I did nothing to stop the flood. I

merely sat there with my two babes in my arms and my Dinkie pressed in

close between my knees, in a foolishly crouching and uncomfortable

position, as though I wanted to shield their tender little bodies with

my own. I remember seeing Struthers run gabbing and screaming about

the room and then try to bury herself under her mattress, like the

silly old she-ostrich she was, with her number sevens sticking out

from under the bedding. I remember seeing Whinnie picking up one of

the white things that had rolled in through the broken window. It was

oblong, and about as big as a pullet's egg, but more irregular in

shape. It was clear on the outside but milky at the center, making me

think of a half-cooked globe of tapioca. But it was a stone of solid

ice. And thousands and thousands of stones like that, millions of

them, were descending on my wheat, were thrashing down my half-ripened

oats, were flailing the world and beating the life and beauty out of

my crops.

The storm ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. The hammers of

Thor that were trying to pound my lonely little prairie-house to

pieces were withdrawn, the tumult stopped, and the light grew

stronger. Whinstane Sandy even roused himself and moved toward the

door, which he opened with the hand of a sleep-walker, and stood

staring out. I could see reflected in that seamed old face the

desolation which for a minute or two I didn't have the heart to look

upon. I knew, even before I got slowly up and followed him toward the

door, that our crop was gone, that we had lost everything.

I stood in the doorway, staring out at what, only that morning, had

been a world golden with promise, rich and bountiful and beautiful to

the eye and blessed in the sight of God. And now, at one stroke, it

was all wiped out. As far as the eye could see I beheld only flattened

and shredded ruin. Every acre of my crop was gone. My year's work had

been for nothing, my blind planning, my petty scheming and contriving,

my foolish little hopes and dreams, all, all were there, beaten down

into the mud.

Yet, oddly enough, it did not stir in me any quick and angry passion

of protest. It merely left me mute and stunned, staring at it with the

eyes of the ox, with a dull wonder in my heart and a duller sense of

deprivation away off at the back of my brain. I scarcely noticed when

little Dinkie toddled out and possessed himself of a number of the

larger hailstones, which he promptly proceeded to suck. When a smaller

one melted in the warmth of his hand, he stared down at the emptiness

between his little brown fingers, wondering where his pretty pebble

had vanished to, just as I wondered where my crop had gone.

But it's gone. There's no doubt of that. The hail went from southwest

to northeast, in a streak about three miles wide, like a conquering

army, licking up everything as it went. Whinnie says that it's the

will of God. Struthers, resurrected from her mattress, proclaims that

it's Fate punishing us for our sins. My head tells me that it's

barometric laws, operating along their own ineluctable lines. But that

doesn't salve the sore.

For the rest of the afternoon we stood about like Italian peasants

after an earthquake, possessed of a sort of collective mutism, doing

nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing. Even my seven dead pullets,

which had been battered to death by the hail, were left to lie where

they had fallen. I noticed a canvas carrier for a binder which Whinnie

had been mending. It was riddled like a sieve. If this worried me, it

worried me only vaguely. It wasn't until I remembered that there would

be no wheat for that binder to cut and no sheaves for that carrier to

bear, that the extent of what had befallen Alabama Ranch once more

came fully home to me. It takes time to digest such things, just as it

takes time to reorganize your world. The McKails, for the second time,

have been cleaned to the bones. We ought to be getting used to it, for

it's the second time we've gone bust in a year!

It wasn't until yesterday morning that any kind of perspective came

back to us. I went to bed the night before wondering about Dinky-Dunk

and hoping against hope that he'd come galloping over to make sure his

family were still in the land of the living. But he didn't come. And

before noon I learned that Casa Grande had not been touched by the

hail. That at least was a relief, for it meant that Duncan was safe

and sound.

In a way, yesterday, there was nothing to do, and yet there was a

great deal to do. It reminded me of the righting up after a funeral.

But I refused to think of anything beyond the immediate tasks in hand.

I just did what had to be done, and went to bed again dog-tired. But I

had nightmare, and woke up in the middle of the night crying for all I

was worth. I seemed alone in an empty world, a world without meaning

or mercy, and there in the blackness of the night when the tides of

life run lowest, I lay with my hand pressed against my heart, with the

feeling that there was nothing whatever left in existence to make it

worth while. Then Pee-Wee stirred and whimpered, and when I lifted him

into my bed and held him against my breast, the nearness of his body

brought warmth and consolation to mine, and I remembered that I was

still a mother....

It was this morning (Sunday) that Dinky-Dunk appeared at Alabama

Ranch. I had looked for him and longed for him, in secret, and my

heart should have leapt up with gladness at the sight of him. But it

didn't. It couldn't. It was like asking a millstone to pirouette.

In the first place, everything seemed wrong. I had a cold in the head

from the sudden drop in the temperature, and I was arrayed in that

drab old gingham wrapper which Dinkie had cut holes in with Struthers'

scissors, for I hadn't cared much that morning when I dressed whether

I looked like a totem-pole or a Stoney squaw. And the dregs of what

I'd been through during the last two days were still sour in the

bottom of my heart. I was a Job in petticoats, a mutineer against man

and God, a nihilist and an I. W. W. all in one. And Dinky-Dunk

appeared in Lady Alicia's car, in _her_ car, carefully togged out in

his Sunday best, with that strangely alien aspect which citified

clothes can give to the rural toiler when he emerges from the costume

of his kind.

But it wasn't merely that he came arrayed in this outer shell of

affluence and prosperity. It was more that there was a sense of

triumph in his heart which he couldn't possibly conceal. And I wasn't

slow to realize what it meant. I was a down-and-outer now, and at his

mercy. He could have his way with me, without any promise of protest.

And whatever he might have done, or might yet do, it was ordained that

I in my meekness should bow to the yoke. All that I must remember was

that he stood my lord and master. I had made my foolish little

struggle to be mistress of my own destiny, and now that I had failed,

and failed utterly, I must bend to whatever might be given to me.

"It's hard luck, Chaddie," he said, with a pretense at being

sympathetic. But there was no real sorrow in his eye as he stood there

surveying my devastated ranch.

"Nix on that King Cophetua stuff!" I curtly and vulgarly proclaimed.

"Just what do you mean?" he asked, studying my face.

"Kindly can the condescension stuff!" I repeated, taking a wayward

satisfaction out of shocking him with the paraded vulgarity of my

phrasing.

"That doesn't sound like you," he said, naturally surprised, I

suppose, that I didn't melt into his arms.

"Why not?" I inquired, noticing that he no longer cared to meet my

eye.

"It sounds hard," he said.

"Well, some man has said that a hard soil makes a hard race," I

retorted, with a glance about at my ruined wheatlands. "Did you have a

pleasant time in Chicago?"

He looked up quickly.

"I wasn't in Chicago," he promptly protested.

"Then that woman lied, after all," I remarked, with a lump of Scotch

granite where my heart ought to have been. For I could see by his face

that he knew, without hesitation, the woman I meant.

"Isn't that an unnecessarily harsh word?" he asked, trying, of course,

to shield her to the last. And if he had not exactly winced, he had

done the next thing to it.

"What would _you_ call it?" I countered. It wouldn't have taken a

microphone, I suppose, to discover the hostility in my tone. "And

would it be going too far to inquire just where you were?" I continued

as I saw he had no intention of answering my first question.

"I was at the Coast," he said, compelling himself to meet my glance.

"I'm sorry that I cut your holiday short," I told him.

"It was scarcely a holiday," he remonstrated.

"What would you call it then?" I asked.

"It was purely a business trip," he retorted.

There had, I remembered, been a great deal of that business during the

past few months. And an ice-cold hand squeezed the last hope of hope

out of my heart. _She_ had been at the Coast.

"And this belated visit to your wife and children, I presume, is also

for business purposes?" I inquired. But he was able to smile at that,

for all my iciness.

"_Is_ it belated?" he asked.

"Wouldn't you call it that?" I quietly inquired.

"But I had to clear up that case of the stolen horses," he protested,

"that Sing Lo thievery."

"Which naturally comes before one's family," I ironically reminded

him.

"But courts are courts, Chaddie," he maintained, with a pretense of

patience.

"And consideration is consideration," I rather wearily amended.

"We can't always do what we want to," he next remarked, apparently

intent on being genially axiomatic.

"Then to what must the humble family attribute this visit?" I

inquired, despising that tone of mockery into which I had fallen yet

seeming unable to drag myself out of its muck-bottom depths.

"To announce that I intend to return to them," he asserted, though it

didn't seem an easy statement to make.

It rather took my breath away, for a moment. But Reason remained on

her throne. It was too much like sticking spurs into a dead horse.

There was too much that could not be forgotten. And I calmly reminded

Dinky-Dunk that the lightest of heads can sometimes have the longest

of memories.

"Then you don't want me back?" he demanded, apparently embarrassed by

my lack of hospitality.

"It all depends on what you mean by that word," I answered, speaking

as judicially as I was able. "If by coming back you mean coming back

to this house, I suppose you have a legal right to do so. But if it

means anything more, I'm afraid it can't be done. You see, Dinky-Dunk,

I've got rather used to single harness again, and I've learned to

think and act for myself, and there's a time when continued unfairness

can kill the last little spark of friendliness in any woman's heart.

It's not merely that I'm tired of it all. But I'm _tired of being

tired_, if you know what that means. I don't even know what I'm going

to do. Just at present, in fact, I don't want to think about it. But

I'd much prefer being alone until I am able to straighten things out

to my own satisfaction."

"I'm sorry," said Dinky-Dunk, looking so crestfallen that for a moment

I in turn felt almost sorry for him.

"Isn't it rather late for that?" I reminded him.

"Yes, I suppose it is," he admitted, with a disturbing new note of

humility. Then he looked up at me, almost defiantly. "But you need my

help."

It was masterful man, once more asserting himself. It was a trivial

misstep, but a fatal one. It betrayed, at a flash, his entire

misjudgment of me, of my feelings, of what I was and what I intended

to be.

"I'm afraid I've rather outlived that period of Bashi-Bazookism," I

coolly and quietly explained to my lord and master. "You may have the

good luck to be confronting me when I seem to be floored. I've been

hailed out, it's true. But that has happened to other people, and they

seem to have survived. And there are worse calamities, I find, than

the loss of a crop."

"Are you referring to anything that I have done?" asked Dinky-Dunk,

with a slightly belligerent look in his eye.

"If the shoe fits, put it on," I observed.

"But there are certain things I want to explain," he tried to argue,

with the look of a man confronted by an overdraft on his patience.

"Somebody has said that a friend," I reminded him, "is a person to

whom one need never explain. And any necessity for explanation, you

see, removes us even from the realm of friendship."

"But, hang it all, I'm your husband," protested my obtuse and somewhat

indignant interlocutor.

"We all have our misfortunes," I found the heart, or rather the

absence of heart, to remark.

"I'm afraid this isn't a very good beginning," said Dinky-Dunk, his

dignity more ruffled than ever.

"It's not a beginning at all," I reminded him. "It's more like an

ending."

That kept him silent for quite a long while.

"I suppose you despise me," he finally remarked.

"It's scarcely so active an emotion," I tried to punish him by

retorting.

"But I at least insist on explaining what took me to the Coast," he

contended.

"That is scarcely necessary," I told him.

"Then you know?" he asked.

"I imagine the whole country-side does," I observed.

He made a movement of mixed anger and protest.

"I went to Vancouver because the government had agreed to take over my

Vancouver Island water-front for their new shipbuilding yards. If

you've forgotten just what that means, I'd like to remind you that

there's----"

"I don't happen to have forgotten," I interrupted, wondering why news

which at one time would have set me on fire could now leave me quite

cold. "But what caused the government to change its mind?"

"Allie!" he said, after a moment's hesitation, fixing a slightly

combative eye on mine.

"She seems to have almost unlimited powers," I observed as coolly as I

could, making an effort to get my scattered thoughts into line again.

"On the contrary," Dinky-Dunk explained with quite painful politeness,

"it was merely the accident that she happened to know the naval

officer on the Imperial Board. She was at Banff the week the board was

there, and she was able to put in a good word for the Vancouver Island

site. And the Imperial verdict swung our own government officials

over."

"You were lucky to have such an attractive wirepuller," I frigidly

announced.

"The luck wasn't altogether on my side," Dinky-Dunk almost as frigidly

retorted, "when you remember that it was giving her a chance to get

rid of a ranch she was tired of!"

I did my best to hide my surprise, but it wasn't altogether a success.

The dimensions of the movement, apparently, were much greater than my

poor little brain had been able to grasp.

"Do you mean it's going to let you take Casa Grande off her ladyship's

hands?" I diffidently inquired.

"That's already arranged for," Dinky-Dunk quite casually informed me.

We were a couple of play-actors, I felt, each deep in a role of his

own, each stirred much deeper than he was ready to admit, and each a

little afraid of the other.

"You are to be congratulated," I told Dinky-Dunk, chilled in spite of

myself, never for a moment quite able to forget the sinister shadow of

Lady Alicia which lay across our trodden little path of everyday life.

"It was you and the kiddies I was thinking of," said my husband, in a

slightly remote voice. And the mockery of that statement, knowing what

I knew, was too much for me.

"I'm sorry you didn't think of us a little sooner," I observed. And I

had the bitter-sweet reward of seeing a stricken light creep up into

Dinky-Dunk's eyes.

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

But I didn't answer that question of his. Instead, I asked him

another.

"Did you know that Lady Alicia came here and announced that she was in

love with you?" I demanded, resolved to let the light in to that

tangled mess which was fermenting in the silo of my soul.

"Yes, I know," he quietly affirmed, as he hung his head. "She told me

about it. And it was _awful_. It should never have happened. It made

me ashamed even--even to face you!"

"That was natural," I agreed, with my heart still steeled against him.

"It makes a fool of a man," he protested, "a situation like that."

"Then the right sort of man wouldn't encourage it," I reminded him,

"wouldn't even permit it." And still again I caught that quick

movement of impatience from him.

"What's that sort of thing to a man of my age?" he demanded. "When you

get to where I am you don't find love looming so large on the horizon.

What--"

"No, it clearly doesn't loom so large," I interrupted.

"What you want then," went on Dinky-Dunk, ignoring me, "is power,

success, the consolation of knowing you're not a failure in life.

_That's_ the big issue, and that's the stake men play big for, and

play hard for."

It was, I remembered in my bitterness of soul, what I myself had been

playing hard for--but I had lost. And it had left my heart dry. It had

left my heart so dry that my own Dinky-Dunk, standing there before me

in the open sunlight, seemed millions of miles removed from me,

mysteriously depersonalized, as remote in spirit as a stranger from

Mars come to converse about an inter-stellar telephone-system.

"Then you've really achieved your ambition," I reminded my husband, as

he stood studying a face which I tried to keep tranquil under his

inspection.

"Oh, no," he corrected, "only a small part of it."

"What's the rest?" I indifferently inquired, wondering why most of

life's victories, after all, were mere Pyrrhic victories.

"You," declared Dinky-Dunk, with a reckless light in his eyes, "You,

and the children, now that I'm in a position to give them what they

want."

"But _are_ you?" I queried.

"Well, that's what I'm coming back to demonstrate," he found the

courage to assert.

"To them?" I asked.

"To all of you!" he said with a valiant air of finality.

I told him it was useless, but he retorted that he didn't propose to

have that stop him. I explained to him that it would be embarrassing,

but he parried that claim by protesting that sacrifice was good for

the soul. I asserted that it would be a good deal of a theatricality,

under the circumstances, but he attempted to brush this aside by

stating that what he had endured for years might be repeated by

patience.

So Dinky-Dunk is coming back to Alabama Ranch! It sounds momentous,

and yet, I know in my heart, that it doesn't mean so very much. He

will sleep under the same roof with me as remote as though he were

reposing a thousand miles away. He will breakfast and go forth to his

work, and my thoughts will not be able to go with him. He will return

with the day's weariness in his bones, but a weariness which I can

neither fathom nor explain in my own will keep my blood from warming

at the sound of his voice through the door. Being still his wife, I

shall have to sew and mend and cook for him. _That_ is the penalty of

prairie life; there is no escape from propinquity.

But that life can go on in this way, indefinitely, is unthinkable.

What will happen, I don't know. But there will have to be a change,

somewhere. There will have to be a change, but I am too tired to worry

over what it will be. I'm too tired even to think of it. That's

something which lies in the lap of Time.

_Saturday the Twenty-fifth_

Dinky-Dunk is back. At least he sleeps and breakfasts at home, but the

rest of the time he is over at Casa Grande getting his crop cut. He's

too busy, I fancy, to pay much attention to our mutual lack of

attention. But the compact was made, and he seems willing to comply

with it. The only ones who fail to regard it are the children. I

hadn't counted on them. There are times, accordingly, when they

somewhat complicate the situation. It didn't take them long to get

re-acquainted with their daddy. I could see, from the first, that he

intended to be very considerate and kind with them, for I'm beginning

to realize that he gets a lot of fun out of the kiddies. Pee-Wee will

go to him, now, from anybody. He goes with an unmistakable expression

of "Us-men-have-got-to-stick-together" satisfaction on his little

face.

But Dinky-Dunk's intimacies, I'm glad to say, do not extend beyond the

children. Three days ago, though, he asked me about turning his hogs

in on my land. It doesn't sound disturbingly emotional. But if what's

left of my crop, of course, is any use to Duncan, he's welcome to

it....

I looked for that letter which I wrote to Dinky-Dunk several weeks

ago, looked for it for an hour and more this morning, but haven't

succeeded in finding it. I was sure that I'd put it between the pages

of the old ranch journal. But it's not there.

Last night before I turned in I read all of Meredith's _Modern Love_.

It was nice to remember that once, at Box Hill, I'd felt the living

clasp of the hand which had written that wonderful series of poems.

But never before did I quite understand that elaborated essay in

love-moods. It came like a friendly voice, like an understanding

comrade who knows the world better than I do, and brought me comfort,

even though the sweetness of it was slightly acidulated, like a

lemon-drop. And as for myself, I suppose I'll continue to

"............sit contentedly

And eat my pot of honey on the grave."

_Sunday the Second_

I have written to Uncle Carlton again, asking him about my Chilean

Nitrate shares. If the company's reorganized and the mines opened

again, surely my stock ought to be worth something.

The days are getting shorter, and the hot weather is over for good, I

hope. I usually like autumn on the prairie, but the thought of fall,

this year, doesn't fill me with any inordinate joy. I'm unsettled and

atonic, and it's just as well, I fancy, that I'm weaning the Twins.

It's not the simple operation I'd expected, but the worst is already

over. Pee-Wee is betraying unmistakable serpentine powers, and it's no

longer safe to leave him on a bed. Poppsy is a fastidious little lady,

and apparently a bit of a philosopher. She is her father's favorite.

Whinstane Sandy is loyal to little Dinkie, and, now that the evenings

are longer, regales him on stories, stories which the little tot can

only half understand. But they must always be about animals, and

Whinnie seems to run to wolves. He's told the story of the skater and

the wolves, with personal embellishments, and Little Red Riding-Hood

in a version all his own, and last night, I noticed, he recounted the

tale of the woman in the sleigh with her children when the pack of

wolves pursued her. And first, to save herself and her family, she

threw her little baby out to the brutes. And when they had gained on

her once more, she threw out her little girl, and then her little boy,

and then her biggest boy of ten. And when she reached a settlement and

told of her deliverance, the Oldest Settler took a wood-ax and clove

her head clear down to the shoulder-blades--the same, of course, being

a punishment for saving herself at the expense of her little ones.

My Dinkie sat wriggling his toes with delight, the tale being of that

gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on

countless other children, for, despite Whinnie's autobiographical

interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive

Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over in his _Ivan

Ivanovitch_.

Dinky-Dunk, wandering in on the tail end of it, remarked: "That's a

fine story, that is, with all those coyotes singing out there!"

"The chief objection to it," I added, "is that the lady didn't drop

her husband over first."

Dinky-Dunk looked down at me as he filled his pipe.

"But the husband, as I remember the story, had been left behind to do

what a mere husband could to save their home," my spouse quietly

reminded me.

_Monday the Tenth_

There was a heavy frost last night. It makes me feel that summer is

over. Dinky-Dunk asked me yesterday why I disliked Casa Grande and

never ventured over into that neighborhood. I evaded any answer by

announcing that there were very few things I liked nowadays....

Only once, lately, have we spoken of Lady Allie. It was Dinky-Dunk, in

fact, who first brought up her name in speaking of the signing of the

transfer-papers.

"Is it true," I found the courage to ask, "that you knew your cousin

quite intimately as a girl?"

Dinky-Dunk laughed as he tamped down his pipe.

"Yes, it _must_ have been quite intimately," he acknowledged. "For

when she was seven and I was nine we went all the way down Teignmouth

Hill together in an empty apple-barrel--than which nothing that I know

of could possibly be more intimate!"

I couldn't join him in his mirth over that incident, for I happened to

remember the look on Lady Alicia's face when she once watched

Dinky-Dunk mount his mustang and ride away. "Aren't men lawds of

creation?" she had dreamily inquired. "Not after you've lived with

them for a couple of years," I had been heartless enough to retort,

just to let her know that I didn't happen to have a skin like a

Douglas pine.

_Sunday the Sixteenth_

I've just had a letter from Uncle Carlton. It's a very long and

businesslike letter, in which he goes into details as to how our

company has been incorporated in _La Association de Productores de

Salitre de Chile_, with headquarters at Valparaiso. It's a new and

rather unexpected arrangement, but he prophesies that with nitrate at

ten shillings per Spanish quintal the returns on the investment, under

the newer conditions, should be quite satisfactory. He goes on to

explain how nitrate is shipped in bags of one hundred kilos, and the

price includes the bags, but the weight is taken on the nitrate only,

involving a deduction from the gross weight of seven-tenths per cent.

Then he ambles off into a long discussion of how the fixation method

from the air may eventually threaten the stability of our entire

amalgamated mines, but probably not during his life-time or even my

own. And I had to read the letter over for the third time before I

winnowed from it the obscure but essential kernel that my shares from

this year forward should bring me in an annual dividend of at least

two thousand, but more probably three, and possibly even four, once

the transportation situation is normalized, but depending largely, of

course, on the labor conditions obtaining in Latin America--and much

more along the same lines.

That news of my long-forgotten and long-neglected nest-egg should have

made me happy. But it didn't. I couldn't quite react to it. As usual,

I thought of the children first, and from their standpoint it did

bring a sort of relief. It was consoling, of course, to know that,

whatever happened, they could have woolens on their little tummies and

shoe-leather on their little piggies. But the news didn't come with

sufficient force to shock the dull gray emptiness out of existence.

I've even been wondering if there's any news that could. For the one

thing that seems always to face me is the absence of intensity from

life. Can it be, I found myself asking to-day, that it's youth, golden

youth, that is slipping away from me?

It startled me a little, to have to face that question. But I shake my

fist in the teeth of Time. I refuse to surrender. I shall not allow

myself to become antiquated. I'm on the wrong track, in some way, but

before I dry up into a winter apple I'm going to find out where the

trouble is, and correct it. I never was much of a sleep-walker. I want

life, Life--and oodles of it....

Among other things, by the way, which I've been missing are books.

They at least are to be had for the buying, and I've decided there's

no excuse for letting the channels of my mind get moss-grown. I've had

a "serious but not fatal wound," as the newspapers say, to my personal

vanity, but there's no use in letting go of things, at my time of

life. Pee-Wee, I'm sure, will never be satisfied with an empty-headed

old frump for a mother, and Dinkie is already asking questions that

are slightly disturbing. Yesterday, in his bath, he held his hand over

his heart. He held it there for quite a long time, and then he looked

at me with widening eyes. "Mummy," he called out, "I've got a m'sheen

inside me!" And Whinnie's explorations are surely worth emulating. I

too have a machine inside me which some day I'll be compelled to

rediscover. It is a machine which, at present, is merely a pump,

though the ancients, I believe, regarded it as the seat of the

emotions.

_Saturday the Twenty-ninth_

Dinky-Dunk is quite subtle. He is ignoring me, as a modern army of

assault ignores a fortress by simply circling about its forbidding

walls and leaving it in the rear. But I can see that he is deliberately

and patiently making love to my children. He is entrenching himself in

their affection.

He is, of course, their father, and it is not for me to interfere.

Last night, in fact, when Pee-Wee cried for his dad, poor old

Dinky-Dunk's face looked almost radiumized. He has announced that on

Tuesday, when he will have to go in to Buckhorn, he intends to carry

along the three kiddies and have their photograph taken. It reminded

me that I had no picture whatever of the Twins. And that reminded me,

in turn, of what a difference there is between your first child and

the tots who come later. Little Dinkie, being a novelty, was followed

by a phosphorescent wake of diaries and snap-shots and weigh-scales

and growth-records, with his birthdays duly reckoned, not by the year,

but by the month.

It's not that I love the Twins less. It's only that the novelty has

passed. And in one way it's a good thing, for over your second and

third baby you worry less. You know what is needed, and how to do it.

You blaze your trail, as a mother, with your first-born. You build

your road, and after that you are no longer a pioneer. You know the

way you have to go, henceforth, and you follow it. It is less a Great

Adventure, perhaps, but, on the other hand, the double-pointed tooth

of Anxiety does not rowel quite so often at the core of your heart....

I've been wondering if, with the coming of the children, there is not

something which slips away from the relationship between husband and

wife. That there is a difference is not to be denied. There was a time

when I resented this and tried to fight against it. But I wasn't big

enough, I suppose, to block the course of Nature. And it _was_ Nature,

you have to admit when you come to look it honestly in the face,

Nature in her inexorable economy working out her inexorable ends. If I

hadn't loved Dinky-Dunk, fondly, foolishly, abandonedly, there would

have been no little Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee. They would have

been left to wander like disconsolate little ghosts through that

lonely and twilit No-Man's Land of barren love and unwanted babes. And

the only thing that keeps me human, nowadays, that keeps me from being

a woman with a dead soul, a she-being of untenanted hide and bones and

dehydrated ham-strings, is my kiddies. The thought of them, at any

time of the day, can put a cedilla under my heart to soften it....

Struthers, who is to go in to Buckhorn with the children when they

have their picture taken, is already deep in elaborating preparations

for that expedition. She is improvising an English nurse's uniform and

has asked if there might be one picture of her and the children.

_Tuesday the Fifteenth_

The children have been away for a whole day, the first time in family

history. And oh, what a difference it makes in this lonely little

prairie home of ours! The quietness, the emptiness, the desolation of

it all was something quite beyond my imagination. I know now that I

could never live apart from them. Whatever happens, I shall not be

separated from my kiddies....

I spent my idle time in getting Peter's music-box in working order.

Dinky-Dunk, who despises it, thoughtlessly sat on the package of

records and broke three of them. I've been trying over the others.

They sound tinny and flat, and I'm beginning to suspect I haven't my

sound-box adjusted right. I've a hunger to hear good music. And

without quite knowing it, I've been craving for city life again, for

at least a taste of it, for even a chocolate cream-soda at a Huyler

counter. Dinky-Dunk yesterday said that I was a cloudy creature, and

accused me of having a mutinous mouth. Men seem to think that love

should be like an eight-day clock, with a moment or two of industrious

winding-up rewarded by a long week of undeviating devotion.

_Sunday the Twenty-seventh_

The thrashing outfits are over at Casa Grande, and my being a mere

spectator of the big and busy final act of the season's drama reminds

me of three years ago, just before Dinkie arrived. Struthers, however,

is at Casa Grande and in her glory, the one and only woman in a circle

of nine active-bodied men.

I begin to see that it's true what Dinky-Dunk said about business

looming bigger in men's lives than women are apt to remember. He's

working hard, and his neck's so thin that his Adam's apple sticks out

like a push-button, but he gets his reward in finding his crop running

much higher than he had figured. He's as keen as ever he was for power

and prosperity. He wants success, and night and day he's scheming for

it. Sometimes I wonder if he didn't deliberately _use_ his cousin

Allie in this juggling back of Casa Grande into his own hands. Yet

Dinky-Dunk, with all his faults, is not, and could not be, circuitous.

I feel sure of that.

He became philosophical, the other day when I complained about the

howling of the coyotes, and protested it was these horizon-singers

that kept the prairie clean. He even argued that the flies which seem

such a pest to the cattle in summer-time are a blessing in disguise,

since the unmolested animals over-eat when feed is plentiful and get

black-rot. So out of suffering comes wisdom and out of endurance comes

fortitude!

_Thursday the Sixth_

On Tuesday morning we had our first snow of the season, or, rather,

before the season. It wasn't much of a snow-storm, but Dinkie was

greatly worked up at the sight of it and I finally put on his little

reefer and his waders and let him go out in it. But the weather had

moderated, the snow turned to slush, and when I rescued Dinkie from

rolling in what looked to him like a world of ice-cream he was a very

wet boy.

On Tuesday night Dinkie, usually so sturdy and strong, woke up with a

tight little chest-cough that rather frightened me. I went over to his

crib and covered him up. But when he wakened me again, a couple of

hours later, the cough had grown tighter. It turned into a sort of

sharp bark. And this time I found Dinkie hot and feverish. So I got

busy, rubbing his chest with sweet oil and turpentine until the skin

was pink and giving him a sip or two of cherry pectoral which I still

had on the upper shelf of the cupboard.

When morning came he was no better. He seemed in a stupor, rousing only

to bark into his pillow. I called Dinky-Dunk in, before he left in the

pouring rain for Casa Grande, and he said, almost indifferently, "Yes,

the boy's got a cold all right." But that was all.

When breakfast was over I tried Dinkie with hot gruel, but he declined

it. He refused to eat, in fact, and remembering what Peter had once

said about my first-born being pantophagous, I began to suspect that I

had a very sick boy on my hands.

At noon, when he seemed no better, I made a mild mustard-plaster and

put it on the upper part of his little chest. I let it burn there

until he began to cry with the discomfort of it. Then I tucked a

double fold of soft flannel above his thorax.

As night came on he was more flushed and feverish than ever, and I

wished to heaven that I'd a clinic thermometer in the house. For by

this time I was more than worried: I was panicky. Yet Duncan, when he

came in, and got out of his oil-skins, didn't seem very sympathetic.

He flatly refused to share my fears. The child, he acknowledged, had a

croupy little chest-cold, but all he wanted was keeping warm and as

much water as he could drink. Nature, he largely protested, would

attend to a case like that.

I was ready to turn on him like a she-tiger, but I held myself in,

though it took an effort. I saw Duncan go off to bed, dog-tired, of

course, but I felt that to go to sleep, under the circumstances, would

be criminal. Dinkie, in the meantime, was waking every now and then

and barking like a baby-coyote. I could have stood it, I suppose, if

that old Bobs of ours hadn't started howling outside, in long-drawn

and dreary howls of unutterable woe. I remembered about a dog always

howling that way when somebody was going to die in the house. And I

concluded, with an icy heart, that it was the death-howl. I tried to

count Dinkie's pulse, but it was so rapid and I was so nervous that I

lost track of the beats. So I decided to call Dinky-Dunk.

He came in to us kind of sleepy-eyed and with his hair rumpled up, and

asked, without thinking, what I wanted.

And I told him, with a somewhat shaky voice, what I wanted. I said I

wanted antiphlogistine, and a pneumonia-jacket, and a doctor, and a

trained nurse, and just a few of the comforts of civilization.

Dinky-Dunk, staring at me as though I were a madwoman, went over to

Dinkie's crib, and felt his forehead and the back of his neck, and held

an ear against the boy's chest, and then against his shoulder-blades.

He said it was all right, and that I myself ought to be in bed. As

though in answer to that Dinkie barked out his croupy protest, tight

and hard, barked as I'd never heard a child bark before. And I began to

fuss, for it tore my heart to think of that little body burning up with

fever and being denied its breath.

"You might just as well get back to bed," repeated Dinky-Dunk, rather

impatiently. And that was the spark which set off the mine, which

pushed me clear over the edge of reason. I'd held myself in for so

long, during weeks and weeks of placid-eyed self-repression, that when

the explosion did come I went off like a Big Bertha. I turned on my

husband with a red light dancing before my face and told him he was a

beast and a heartless brute. He tried to stop me, but it was no use. I

even said that this was a hell of a country, where a white woman had

to live like a Cree squaw and a child had to die like a sick hound in

a coulee. And I said a number of other things, which must have cut to

the raw, for even in the uncertain lamplight I could see that

Dinky-Dunk's face had become a kind of lemon-color, which is the

nearest to white a sunburned man seems able to turn.

"I'll get a doctor, if you want one," he said, with an

over-tried-patience look in his eyes.

"_I_ don't want a doctor," I told him, a little shrill-voiced with

indignation. "It's the child who wants one."

"I'll get your doctor," he repeated as he began dressing, none too

quickly. And it took him an interminable time to get off, for it was

raining cats and dogs, a cold, sleety rain from the northeast, and the

shafts had to be taken off the buckboard and a pole put in, for it

would require a team to haul anything on wheels to Buckhorn, on such a

night.

It occurred to me, as I stood at the window and saw Dinky-Dunk's

lantern wavering about in the rain while he was getting the team and

hooking them on to the buckboard, that it would be only the decent

thing to send him off with a cup of hot coffee, now that I had the

kettle boiling. But he'd martyrize himself, I knew, by refusing it,

even though I made it. And he was already sufficiently warmed by the

fires of martyrdom.

Yet it was an awful night, I realized when I stood in the open door

and stared after him as he swung out into the muddy trail with the

stable lantern lashed to one end of his dashboard. And I felt sorry,

and a little guilty, about the neglected cup of coffee.

I went back to little Dinkie, and found him asleep. So I sat down

beside him. I sat there wrapped up in one of Dinky-Dunk's four-point

Hudson-Bays, deciding that if the child's cough grew tighter I'd rig

up a croup-tent, as I'd once seen Chinkie's doctor do with little

Gimlets. But Dinkie failed to waken. And I fell asleep myself, and

didn't open an eye until I half-tumbled out of the chair, well on

toward morning.

By the time Dinky-Dunk got back with the doctor, who most unmistakably

smelt of Scotch whisky, I had breakfast over and the house in order

and the Twins fed and bathed and off for their morning nap. I had a

fresh nightie on little Dinkie, who rather upset me by announcing that

he wanted to get up and play with his Noah's Ark, for his fever seemed

to have slipped away from him and the tightness had gone from his

cough. But I said nothing as that red-faced and sweet-scented doctor

looked the child over. His stethoscope, apparently, tickled Dinkie's

ribs, for after trying to wriggle away a couple of times he laughed

out loud. The doctor also laughed. But Dinky-Dunk's eye happened to

meet mine.

It would be hard to describe his expression. All I know is that it

brought a disagreeable little sense of shame to my hypocritical old

heart, though I wouldn't have acknowledged it, for worlds.

"Why, those lungs are clear," I heard the man of medicine saying to my

husband. "It's been a nasty little cold, of course, but nothing to

worry over."

His optimism struck me as being rather unprofessional, for if you

travel half a night to a case, it seems to me, it ought not to be

brushed aside with a laugh. And I was rather sorry that I had such a

good breakfast waiting for them. Duncan, it's true, did not eat a

great deal, but the way that red-faced doctor lapped up my coffee with

clotted cream and devoured bacon and eggs and hot muffins should have

disturbed any man with an elementary knowledge of dietetics. And by

noon Dinkie was pretty much his old self again. I half expected that

Duncan would rub it in a little. But he has remained discreetly

silent.

Next time, of course, I'll have a better idea of what to do. But I've

been thinking that this exquisite and beautiful animalism known as the

maternal instinct can sometimes emerge from its exquisiteness.

Children are a joy and a glory, but you pay for that joy and glory

when you see them stretched out on a bed of pain, with the shadow of

Death hovering over them.

When I tried to express something like this to Dunkie last night,

somewhat apologetically, he looked at me with an odd light in his

somber old Scotch Canadian eye.

"Wait until you see him really ill," he remarked, man-like, stubbornly

intent on justifying himself. But I was too busy saying a little

prayer, demanding of Heaven that such a day might never come, to

bother about delivering myself of the many laboriously concocted

truths which I'd assembled for my bone-headed lord and master. I was

grateful enough for things as they were, and I could afford to be

generous.

_Sunday the Ninth_

For the first time since I came out on the prairie, I dread the thought

of winter. Yet it's really something more than the winter I dread,

since snow and cold have no terrors for me. I need only to look back

about ten short months and think of those crystal-clear winter days of

ours, with the sleigh piled up with its warm bear-robes, the low sun on

the endless sea of white, the air like champagne, the spanking team

frosted with their own breath, the caroling sleigh-bells, and the man

who still meant so much to me at my side. Then the homeward drive at

night, under violet clear skies, over drifts of diamond-dust, to the

warmth and peace and coziness of one's own hearth! It was often

razor-edge weather, away below zero, but we had furs enough to defy any

threat of frost-nip.

We still have the furs, it's true, but there's the promise of a

different kind of frost in the air now, a black frost that creeps into

the heart which no furs can keep warm....

We still have the furs, as I've already said, and I've been looking

them over. They're so plentiful in this country that I've rather lost

my respect for them. Back in the old days I used to invade those

mirrored and carpeted _salons_ where a trained and deferential

saleswoman would slip sleazy and satin-lined moleskin coats over my

arms and adjust baby-bear and otter and ermine and Hudson-seal next to

my skin. It always gave me a very luxurious and Empressy sort of

feeling to see myself arrayed, if only experimentally, in silver-fox

and plucked beaver and fisher, to feel the soft pelts and observe how

well one's skin looked above seal-brown or shaggy bear.

But I never knew what it cost. I never even considered where they came

from, or what they grew on, and it was to me merely a vague and

unconfirmed legend that they were all torn from the carcasses of

far-away animals. Prairie life has brought me a little closer to that

legend, and now that I know what I do, it makes a difference.

For with the coming of the cold weather, last winter, Francois and

Whinstane Sandy took to trapping, to fill in the farm-work hiatus.

They made it a campaign, and prepared for it carefully, concocting

stretching-rings and cutting-boards and fashioning rabbit-snares and

overhauling wicked-looking iron traps, which were quite ugly enough

even before they became stained and clotted and rusted with blood.

They had a very successful season, but even at the first it struck me as

odd to see two men, not outwardly debased, so soberly intent on their

game of killing. And in the end I got sick of the big blood-rusted traps

and the stretching-rings and the blood-smeared cutting-boards and the

smell of pelts being cured. For every pelt, I began to see, meant pain

and death. In one trap Francois found only the foot of a young red fox:

it had gnawed its leg off to gain freedom from those vicious iron jaws

that had bitten so suddenly into its flesh and bone and sinew. He also

told me of finding a young bear which had broken the anchor-chain of a

twelve-pound trap and dragged it over one hundred miles. All the fight,

naturally, was gone out of the little creature. It was whimpering like a

woman when Francois came up with it--poor little tortured broken-hearted

thing! And some empty-headed heiress goes mincing into the Metropolitan,

on a Caruso night, very proud and peacocky over her new ermine coat,

without ever dreaming it's a patchwork of animal sufferings that is

keeping her fat body warm, and that she's trying to make herself

beautiful in a hundred tragedies of the wild.

If women only thought of these things! But we women have a very

convenient hand-made imagination all our own, and what upsets us as

perfect ladies we graciously avoid. Yet if the petticoated Vandal in

that ermine coat were compelled to behold from her box-chair in the

Metropolitan, not a musty old love-affair set to music, but the

spectacle of how each little animal whose skin she has appropriated

had been made to suffer, the hours and sometimes days of torture it

had endured, and how, if still alive when the trapper made the rounds

of his sets, it had been carefully strangled to death by that frugal

harvester, to the end that the pelt might not be bloodied and reckoned

only as a "second"--if the weasel-decked lady, I repeat, had to

witness all this with her own beaded eyes, our wilderness would not be

growing into quite such a lonely wilderness.

Or some day, let's put it, as one of these beaver-clad ladies tripped

through the Ramble in Central Park, supposing a steel-toothed trap

suddenly and quite unexpectedly snapped shut on her silk-stockinged

ankle and she writhed and moaned there in public, over the week-end.

Then possibly her cries of suffering might make her sisters see a

little more light. But the beaver, they tell me, is trapped under the

ice, always in running water. A mud-ball is placed a little above the

waiting trap, to leave the water opaque, and when the angry iron jaws

have snapped shut on their victim, that victim drowns, a prisoner.

Francois used to contend shruggingly that it was an easy death. It may

be easy compared with some of the other deaths imposed on his furry

captives. But it's not my idea of bliss, drowning under a foot or two

of ice with a steel trap mangling your ankle for full measure!

"We live forward, but we understand backward." I don't know who first

said it. But the older I grow the more I realize how true it is.

_Sunday the Umptieth_

I've written to Peter, reminding him of his promise, and asking about

the Pasadena bungalow.

It seems the one way out. I'm tired of living like an Alpine ibex, all

day long above the snow-line. I'm tired of this blind alley of

inaction. I'm tired of decisions deferred and threats evaded. I want to

get away to think things over, to step back and regain a perspective on

the over-smudged canvas of life.

To remain at Alabama Ranch during the winter can mean only a winter of

discontent and drifting--and drifting closer and closer to uncharted

rocky ledges. There's no ease for the mouth where one tooth aches, as

the Chinese say.

Dinky-Dunk, I think, has an inkling of how I feel. He is very

thoughtful and kind in small things, and sometimes looks at me with

the eyes of a boy's dog which has been forbidden to follow the village

gang a-field. And it's not that I dislike him, or that he grates on

me, or that I'm not thankful enough for the thousand and one little

kind things he does. But it's rubbing on the wrong side of the glass.

It can't bring back the past. My husband of to-day is not the

Dinky-Dunk I once knew and loved and laughed with. To go back to dogs,

it reminds me of Chinkie's St. Bernard, "Father Tom," whom Chinkie

petted and trained and loved almost to adoration. And when poor old

Father Tom was killed Chinkie in his madness insisted that a

taxidermist should stuff and mount that dead dog, which stood,

thereafter, not a quick and living companion but a rather gruesome

monument of a vanished friendship. It was, of course, the shape and

color of the thing he had once loved; but you can't feed a hungry

heart by staring at a pair of glass eyes and a wired tail without any

wag in it.

_Saturday the Ninth_

Struthers and I have been busy making clothes, during the absence of

Dinky-Dunk, who has been off duck-shooting for the last three days. He

complained of being a bit tuckered out and having stood the gaff too

long and needing a change. The outing will do him good. The children

miss him, of course, but he's promised to bring Dinkie home an Indian

bow-and-arrow. I can see death and destruction hanging over the

glassware of this household.... The weather has been stormy, and

yesterday Whinnie and Struthers put up the stove in the bunk-house.

They were a long time about it, but I was reluctant to stop the

flutterings of Cupid's wings.

_Tuesday the Twelfth_

I had a brief message from Peter stating the Pasadena house is

entirely at my disposal.... Dinky-Dunk came back with a real

pot-hunter's harvest of wild ducks, which we'll pick and dress and

freeze for winter use. I'm taking the breast-feathers for my pillows

and Whinstane Sandy is taking what's left for a sleeping-bag--from

which I am led to infer that he's still reconciled to a winter of

solitude. Struthers, I know, could tell him of a warmer bag than that,

lined with downier feathers from the pinions of Eros. But, as I've

said before, Fate, being blind, weaves badly.

_Friday the Fifteenth_

I've just told Dinky-Dunk of my decision to take the kiddies to

California for the winter months. He rather surprised me by agreeing

with everything I suggested. He feels, I think, as I do, that there's

danger in going aimlessly on and on as we have been doing. And it's

really a commonplace for the prairie rancher--when he can afford

it--to slip down to California for the winter. They go by the

thousand, by the train-load.

_Friday the Sixth_

It's three long weeks since I've had time for either ink or retrospect.

But at last I'm settled, though I feel as though I'd died and ascended

into Heaven, or at least changed my world, as the Chinks say, so

different is Pasadena to the prairie and Alabama Ranch. For as I sit

here on the _loggia_ of Peter's house I'm bathed in a soft breeze that

is heavy with a fragrance of flowers, the air is the air of our

balmiest midsummer, and in a pepper-tree not thirty feet away a

mocking-bird is singing for all it's worth. It seems a poignantly

beautiful world. And everything suggests peace. But it was not an easy

peace to attain.

In the first place, the trip down was rather a nightmare. It brought

home to me the fact that I had three young barbarians to break and

subjugate, three untrained young outlaws who went wild with their

first plunge into train-travel and united in defiance of Struthers and

her foolishly impressive English uniform which always makes me think

of Regent Park. I have a suspicion that Dinky-Dunk all the while knew

of the time I'd have, but sagely held his peace.

I had intended, when I left home, to take the boat at Victoria and go

down to San Pedro, for I was hungry for salt water and the feel of a

rolling deck under my feet again. But the antics of my three little

outlaws persuaded me, before we pulled into Calgary, that it would be

as well to make the trip south as short a one as possible. Dinkie

disgraced me in the dining-car by insisting on "drinking" his mashed

potatoes, and made daily and not always ineffectual efforts to

appropriate all the fruit on the table, and on the last day, when I'd

sagaciously handed him over to the tender mercies of Struthers, I

overheard this dialogue:

"I want shooder in my soup!"

"But little boys don't eat sugar in their soup."

"I want shooder in my soup!"

"But, darling, mommie doesn't eat sugar in her soup!"

"Shooder! Dinkie wants shooder, shooder in his soup!"

"Daddy never eats shooder in his soup, Sweetness."

"I want shooder!"

"But really nice little boys don't ask for sugar in their soup,"

argued the patient-eyed Struthers.

"_Shooder!_" insisted the implacable tyrant. And he got it.

There was an exceptional number of babies and small children on board

and my unfraternal little prairie-waifs did not see why every rattle

and doll and automatic toy of their little fellow travelers and sister

tourists shouldn't promptly become their own private property. And

traveling with twins not yet a year old is scarcely conducive to rest.

And yet, for all the worry and tumult, I found a new peace creeping

into my soul. It was the first sight of the Rockies, I think, which

brought the change. I'd grown tired of living on a billiard-table,

without quite knowing it, tired of the trimly circumscribed monotony

of material life, of the isolating flat contention against hunger and

want. But the mountains took me out of myself. They were Peter's

windmill, raised to the Nth power. They loomed above me, seeming to

say: "We are timeless. You, puny one, can live but a day." They stood

there as they had stood from the moment God first whispered: "Let

there be light"--and there was light. But no, I'm wrong there, as

Peter would very promptly have told me, for it was only in the

Cambrian Period that the cornerstone of the Rockies was laid. The

geologic clock ticked out its centuries until the swamps of the Coal

Period were full of Peter's Oldest Inhabitants in the form of

Dinosaurs and then came the Cretaceous Period and the Great Architect

looked down and bade the Rockies arise, and tooled them into beauty

with His blue-green glaciers and His singing rivers, and touched the

lordliest peaks with wine-glow and filled the azure valleys with music

and peace. And we threaded along those valley-sides on our little

ribbons of steel, skirted the shouting rivers and plunged into tiny

twisted tubes of darkness, emerging again into the light and once more

hearing the timeless giants, with their snow-white heads against the

sunset, repeat their whisper: "We live and are eternal. Ye, who fret

about our feet, dream for a day, and are forgotten!"

But we seemed to be stepping out into a new world, by the time we got

to Pasadena. It was a summery and flowery and holiday world, and it

impressed me as being solely and scrupulously organized for pleasure.

Yet all minor surprises were submerged in the biggest surprise of

Peter's bungalow, which is really more like a _chateau_, and strikes

me as being singularly like Peter himself, not amazingly impressive to

look at, perhaps, but hiding from the world a startingly rich and

luxurious interior. The house itself, half hidden in shrubbery, is of

weather-stained stucco, and looks at first sight a little gloomy, with

the _patina_ of time upon it. But it is a restful change from the

spick-and-spanness of the near-by millionaire colony, so eloquent of

the paint-brush and the lawn-valet's shears, so smug and new and

strident in its paraded opulence. Peter's gardens, in fact, are a

rather careless riot of color and line, a sort of achieved genteel

roughness, like certain phases of his house, as though the wave of

refinement driven too high had broken and tumbled over on itself.

The house, which is the shape of an "E" without the middle stroke, has

a green-sodded _patio_ between the two wings, with a small fountain

and a stained marble basin at the center. There are shade-trees and

date-palms and shrubs and Romanesque-looking stone seats about narrow

walks, for this is the only really formalized portion of the entire

property. This leads off into a grove and garden, a confusion of

flowers and trees where I've already been able to spot out a number of

orange trees, some of them well fruited, several lemon and fig trees,

a row of banana trees, or plants, whichever they should be called,

besides pepper and palm and acacia and a long-legged double-file of

eucalyptus at the rear. And in between is a pergola and a mixture of

mimosa and wistaria and tamarisk and poppies and trellised roses and

one woody old geranium with a stalk like a crab-apple trunk and growth

enough to cover half a dozen prairie hay-stacks.

But, as I've already implied, it was the inside of the house that

astonished me. It is much bigger than it looks and is crowded with the

most gorgeous old things in copper and brass and leather and mahogany

that I ever saw under one roof. It has three open fireplaces, a huge

one of stone in the huge living-room, and rough-beamed ceilings of

redwood, and Spanish tiled floors, and chairs upholstered with cowhide

with the ranch-brand still showing in the tanned leather, and tables

of Mexican mahogany set in redwood frames, and several convenient

little electric heaters which can be carried from room to room as they

are needed.

Pinshaw, Peter's gardener and care-taker, had before our arrival

picked several clumps of violets, with perfume like the English

violets, and the house was aired and everything waiting and ready when

we came, even to two bottles of certified milk in the icebox for the

babies and half a dozen Casaba melons for their elders. My one

disturbing thought is that it will be a hard house to live up to. But

Struthers, who is not untouched with her _folie de grandeur_, has the

slightly flurried satisfaction of an exile who has at last come into

her own. One of the first things I must do, however, is to teach my

kiddies to respect Peter's belongings. In one cabinet of books, which

is locked, I have noticed several which are by "Peter Ketley" himself.

Yet that name meant nothing to me, when I met it out on the prairie

and humiliated its owner by converting him into one of my hired hands.

_Ce monde est plein de fous._

_Monday the Sixteenth_

This is a great climate for meditation. And I have been meditating.

Back at Alabama Ranch, I suppose, there's twenty degrees of frost and

a northwest wind like a search-warrant. Here there's a pellucid blue

sky, just enough breeze to rustle the bamboo-fronds behind me, and a

tall girl in white lawn, holding a pale green parasol over her head

and meandering slowly along the sun-steeped boulevard, which smells of

hot tar.

I've been sitting here staring down that boulevard, with the strong

light making me squint a little. I've been watching the two rows of

date-palms along the curb, with their willow-plume head-dress stirring

lazily in the morning breeze. Well back from the smooth and shining

asphalt, as polished as ebony with its oil-drip and tire-wear, is a

row of houses, some shingled and awninged, some Colonial-Spanish, and

stuccoed and bone-white in the sun, some dark-wooded and vine-draped

and rose-grown, but all immaculate and finished and opulent. The

street is very quiet, but half-way down the block I can see a Jap

gardener in brown denim sedately watering a well-barbered terrace.

Still farther away, somebody, in one of the deep-shadowed porches, is

tinkling a ukelele, and somebody that I can't see is somewhere beating

a rug. I can see a little rivulet of water that flows sparkling down

the asphalted runnel of the curb. Then the clump of bamboos back by

Peter's bedroom window rustles crisply again and is quiet and the

silence is broken by a nurse-maid calling to a child sitting in a toy

motor-wagon. Then a touring-car purrs past, with the sun flashing on

its polished metal equipment, and the toy motor child being led

reluctantly homeward by the maid cries shrilly, and in the silence

that ensues I can hear the faint hiss of a spray-nozzle that builds a

transient small rainbow just beyond the trellis of Cherokee roses from

which a languid white petal falls, from time to time.

It's a _dolce-far-niente_ day, as all the days seem to be here, and

the best that I can do is sit and brood like a Plymouth Rock with a

full crop. But I've been thinking things over. And I've come to

several conclusions.

One is that I'm not so contented as I thought I was going to be. I am

oppressed by a shadowy feeling of in some way sailing under false

colors. I am also hounded by an equally shadowy impression that I'm a

convalescent. Yet I find myself vulgarly healthy, my kiddies have all

acquired a fine coat of tan, and only Struthers is slightly off her

feed, having acquired a not unmerited attack of cholera morbus from

over-indulgence in Casaba melon. But I keep wondering if Dinky-Dunk is

getting the right sort of things to eat, if he's lonely, and what he

does in his spare time.

And another conclusion I've come to is that men, much as I hate to

admit it, are built of a stronger fiber than women. They seem able to

stand shock better than the weaker sex. They are not so apt to go down

under defeat, to take the full count, as I have done. For I still have

to face the fact that I was a failure. Then I turned tail and fled

from the scene of my collapse. That flight, it is true, has brought me

a certain brand of peace, but it is not an enduring peace, for you

can't run away from what's in your own heart. And already I'm restless

and ill-at-ease. It's not so much that I'm dissatisfied; it's more

that I'm unsatisfied. There still seems to be something momentous left

out of the plan of things. I have the teasing feeling of confronting

something which is still impending, which is being withheld, which I

can not reach out for, no matter how I try, until the time is ripe....

Those rustling bamboos so close to the room where I sleep have begun

to bother me so much that I'm migrating to a new bedroom to-night.

"There's never anything without something!"

_Tuesday the Twenty-fourth_

Little Dinky-Dunk has adventured into illicit knowledge of his first

orange from the bough. It was one of Peter's low-hanging Valencias,

and seems to have left no ill-effects, though I prefer that all inside

matter be carefully edited before consumption by that small Red. So

Struthers hereafter must stand the angel with the flaming sword and

guard the gates that open upon that tree of forbidden fruit. Her own

colic, by the way, is a thing of the past, and at present she's

extremely interested in Pinshaw, who, she tells me, was once a

cabinet-maker in England, and came out to California for his health.

Struthers, as usual, is attempting to reach the heart of her new

victim by way of the stomach, and Pinshaw, apparently, is not

unappreciative, since he appears a little more punctually at his

watering and raking and gardening and has his ears up like a rabbit

for the first inkling of his lady-love's matutinal hand-out. And poor

old Whinstane Sandy, back at Alabama Ranch, is still making sheep's

eyes at the patches which Struthers once sewed on his breeks, like as

not, and staring with a moonish smile at the atrabilious photograph

which the one camera-artist of Buckhorn made of Struthers and my three

pop-eyed kiddies....

These are, without exception, the friendliest people I have ever known.

The old millionaire lumberman from Bay City, who lives next door to me,

pushes through the hedge with platefuls of green figs and tid-bits from

his gardens, and delightful girls whose names I don't even know come in

big cars and ask to take little Dinkie off for one of their lawn

_fetes_. It even happened that a movie-actor--who, I later discovered,

was a drug-addict--insisted on accompanying me home and informed me on

the way that I had a dream of a face for camera-work. It quite set me

up, for all its impertinence, until I learned to my sorrow that it had

flowered out of nothing more than an extra shot in the arm.

They are a friendly and companionable folk, and they'd keep me on the

go all the time if I'd let 'em. But I've only had energy enough to run

over to Los Angeles twice, though there are a dozen or two people I

must look up in that more frolicsome suburb. But I can't get away from

the feeling, the truly rural feeling, that I'm among strangers. I

can't rid myself of the extremely parochial impression that these

people are not my people. And there's a valetudinarian aspect to the

place which I find slightly depressing. For this seems to be the one

particular point where the worn-out old money-maker comes to die, and

the antique ladies with asthma struggle for an extra year or two of

the veranda rocking-chair, and rickety old _beaux_ sit about in

Panamas and white flannels and listen to the hardening of their

arteries. And I haven't quite finished with life yet--not if I know

it--not by a long shot!

But one has to be educated for idleness, I find, almost as much as for

industry. I knew the trick once, but I've lost the hang of it. The one

thing that impresses me, on coming straight from prairie life to a

city like this, is how much women-folk can have done for them without

quite knowing it. The machinery of life here is so intricate and yet

so adequate that it denudes them of all the normal and primitive

activities of their grandmothers, so they have to invent troubles and

contrive quite unnecessary activities to keep from being bored to

extinction. Everything seems to come to them ready-made and duly

prepared, their bread, their light and fuel and water, their meat and

milk. All that, and the daily drudgery it implies, is made ready and

performed beyond their vision, and they have no balky pumps to prime

and no fires to build, and they'd probably be quite disturbed to think

that their roasts came from a slaughter-house with bloody floors and

that their breakfast rolls, instead of coming ready-made into the

world, are mixed and molded in bake-rooms where men work sweating by

night, stripped to the waist, like stokers.

_Wednesday the Second_

Dinky-Dunk's letter, which reached me Monday, was very short and

almost curt. It depressed me for a day. I tried to fight against that

feeling, when it threatened to return yesterday, and was at Peter's

piano shouting to the kiddies:

"Coon, Coon, Coon, I wish my color'd fade!

Coon, Coon, Coon, I'd like a different shade!"

when Struthers carried in to me, with a sort of triumphant and

tight-lipped I-told-you-so air, a copy of the morning's _Los Angeles

Examiner_. She had it folded so that I found myself confronting a

picture of Lady Alicia Newland, Lady Alicia in the "Teddy-Bear" suit

of an aviator, with a fur-lined leather jacket and helmet and heavy

gauntlets and leggings and the same old audacious look out of the

quietly smiling eyes, which were squinting a little because of the

sunlight.

Lady Allie, I found on perusing the letter-press, had been flying with

some of the North Island officers down in San Diego Bay. And now she

and the Right Honorable Lieutenant-Colonel Brereton Ainsley-Brook, of

the British Imperial Commission to Canada, were to attempt a flight to

Kelly Field Number Two, at San Antonio, in Texas, in a De Haviland

machine. She had told the _Examiner_ reporter who had caught her as

she stood beside a naval sea-plane, that she "loved" flying and loved

taking a chance and that her worst trouble was with nose-bleed, which

she'd get over in time, she felt sure. And if the Texas flight was a

success she would try to arrange for a flight down to the Canal at the

same time that the Pacific fleet comes through from Colon.

"Isn't that 'er, all over?" demanded Struthers, forgetting her place

and her position and even her aspirate in the excitement of the

moment. But I handed back the paper without comment. For a day,

however, Lady Allie has loomed large in my thoughts.

_Sunday the Thirteenth_

It will be two weeks to-morrow since I've had a line from Dinky-Dunk.

The world about me is a world of beauty, but I'm worried and restless

and Edna Millay's lines keep running through my head:

"...East and West will pinch the heart

That can not keep them pushed apart;

And he whose soul is flat--the sky

Will cave in on him by and by!"

_Wednesday the Sixteenth_

Peter has written to me saying that unless he hears from me to the

contrary he thinks he can arrange to "run through" to the Coast in

time for the Rose Tournament here on New Year's Day. He takes the

trouble to explain that he'll stay at the Alexandria in Los Angeles,

so there'll be no possible disturbance to me and my family routine.

That's so like Peter!

But there's been no word from Dinky-Dunk. The conviction is growing in

my mind that he's not at Alabama Ranch.

_Monday the Twenty-first_

A letter has just come to me this morning from Whinstane Sandy,

written in lead-pencil. It said, with an orthography all its own, that

Duncan had been in bed for two weeks with what they thought was

pneumonia, but was up again and able to eat something, and not to

worry. It seemed a confident and cheerful message at first, but the

oftener I read it the more worried I became. So one load was taken off

my heart only to make room for another. My first decision was to start

north at once, to get back to Alabama Ranch and my Dinky-Dunk as fast

as steam could take me. I was still the sharer of his joys and

sorrows, and ought to be with him when things were at their worst. But

on second thought it didn't seem quite fair to the kiddies, to dump

them from midsummer into shack-life and a sub-zero climate. And

always, always, always, there were the children to be considered. So I

wired Ed Sherman, the station-agent at Buckhorn, asking him to send

out a message to Duncan, saying I was waiting for him in Pasadena and

to come at once....

I wonder what his answer will be? It's surrender, on my part. It's

capitulation, and Dinky-Dunk, of course, will recognize that fact. Or

he ought to. But it's not this I'm worrying over. It's Duncan himself,

and his health. It gives me a guilty feeling.... I once thought that I

was made to heal hearts. But about all I can do, I find, is to bruise

them.

_Thursday the Twenty-fourth_

A telegram of just one word has come from Duncan, dated at Calgary. It

said: "Coming." I could feel a little tremble in my knees as I read

it. He must be better, or he'd never be able to travel. To-morrow will

be Christmas Day, but we've decided to postpone all celebration until

the kiddies' daddy is on the scene. It will never seem much like

Christmas to us Eskimos, at eighty-five in the shade. And we're

temporarily subduing that red-ink day to the eyes of the children by

carefully secreting in one of Peter's clothes-closets each and every

present that has come for them.

_Sunday the Twenty-seventh_

Dinky-Dunk is here. He arrived this morning, and we were all at the

station in our best bib-and-tucker and making a fine show of being

offhanded and light-hearted. But when I saw the porter helping down my

Diddums, so white-faced and weak and tired-looking, something swelled

up and burst just under my floating ribs and for a moment I thought my

heart had had a blow-out like a tire and stopped working for ever and

ever. Heaven knows I held my hands tight, and tried to be cheerful,

but in spite of everything I could do, on the way home, I couldn't

stop the tears from running slowly down my cheeks. They kept running

and running, as though I had nothing to do with it, exactly as a wound

bleeds. The poor man, of course, was done out by the long trip. He was

just _blooey_, and saved himself from being pitiful by shrinking back

into a shell of chalky-faced self-sufficiency. He has said very

little, and has eaten nothing, but had a sleep this afternoon for a

couple of hours, out in the _patio_ on a _chaise-longue_. It hurt him,

I think, to find his own children look at him with such cold and

speculative eyes. But he has changed shockingly since they last saw

him. And they have so much to fill up their little lives. They haven't

yet reached the age when life teaches them they'd better stick to

what's given them, even though there's a bitter tang to its sweetness!

_Wednesday the Thirtieth_

It is incredible, what three days of rest and forced feeding at my

implacable hands, have done for Dinky-Dunk. He is still a little shaky

on his pins, if he walks far, and the noonday sun makes him dizzy, but

his eyes don't look so much like saucers and I haven't heard the trace

of a cough from him all to-day. Illness, of course, is not romantic, but

it plays its altogether too important part in life, and has to be faced.

And there is something so disturbingly immuring and depersonalizing

about it! Dinky-Dunk appears rather in a world by himself. Only once, so

far, has he seemed to step back to our every-day old world. That was

when he wandered into the Blue Room in the East Wing where little Dinkie

has been sleeping. I was seated beside his little lordship's bed

singing:

"The little pigs sleep with their tails curled up,"

and when that had been exhausted, rambling on to

"The sailor being both tall and slim,

The lady fell in love with him,"

when _pater familias_ wandered in and inquired, "Whyfore the cabaret?"

I explained that Dinkie, since coming south, had seemed to demand an

even-song or two before slipping off.

"I see that I'll have to take our son in hand," announced

Dinky-Dunk--but there was just the shadow of a smile about his lips as

he went slowly out and closed the door after him.

To-night, when I told Dinky-Dunk that Peter would in all likelihood be

here to-morrow, he listened without batting an eyelash. But he asked

if I'd mind handing him a cigarette, and he studied my face long and

intently. I don't know what he saw there, or what he concluded, for I

did my best to keep it as noncommittal as possible. If there is any

move, it must be from him. That sour-inked Irishman called Shaw has

said that women are the wooers in this world. A lot he knows about

it!... Yet something has happened, in the last half-hour, which both

disturbs and puzzles me. When I was unpacking Dinky-Dunk's second

trunk, which had stood neglected for almost four long days, I came

across the letter which I thought I'd put away in the back of the

ranch ledger and had failed to find.... And he had it, all the time!

The redoubtable Struthers, it must be recorded, to-day handed me

another paper, and almost as triumphantly as the first one. She'd

picked it up on her way home from the druggist's, where she went for

aspirin for Dinky-Dunk. On what was labeled its "Woman's Page" was yet

another photographic reproduction of the fair Lady Allie in aviation

togs and a head-line which read: "Insists On Tea Above The Clouds."

But I plainly disappointed the expectant Struthers by promptly handing

the paper back to her and by declining to make any comment.

_Thursday the Thirty-first_

Peter walked in on us to-day, a little less spick and span, I'm

compelled to admit, than I had expected of one in his position, but as

easy and unconcerned as though he had dropped in from across the way

for a cigarette and a cup of tea. And I played up to that pose by

having Struthers wheel the tea-wagon out into the _patio_, where we

gathered about it in a semicircle, as decorously as though we were

sitting in a curate's garden to talk over the program for the next

meeting of the Ladies' Auxiliary.

There we sat, Dinky-Dunk, my husband who was in love with another woman;

Peter, my friend, who was in love with me, and myself, who was too busy

bringing up a family to be in love with anybody. There we sat in that

beautiful garden, in that balmy and beautiful afternoon sunlight, with

the bamboos whispering and a mocking-bird singing from its place on the

pepper-tree, stirring our small cups and saying "Lemon, please," or

"Just one lump, thank you." It may not be often, but life _does_

occasionally surprise us by being theatrical. For I could not banish

from my bones an impression of tremendous reservations, of guarded

waiting and watching from every point of that sedate and quiet-mannered

little triangle. Yet for only one moment had I seen it come to the

front. That was during the moment when Dinky-Dunk and Peter first shook

hands. On both faces, for that moment, I caught the look with which two

knights measure each other. Peter, as he lounged back in his wicker

chair and produced his familiar little briar pipe, began to remind me

rather acutely of that pensive old _picador_ in Zuloaga's _The Victim of

The Fete_, the placid and plaintive and only vaguely hopeful knight on

his bony old Rosinante, not quite ignorant of the fact that he must

forage on to other fields and look for better luck in newer ventures,

yet not quite forgetful that life, after all, is rather a blithe

adventure and that the man who refuses to surrender his courage, no

matter what whimsical turns the adventure may take, is still to be

reckoned the conqueror. But later on he was jolly enough and direct

enough, when he got to showing Dinky-Dunk his books and curios. I

suppose, at heart, he was about as interested in those things as an

aquarium angel-fish is in a Sunday afternoon visitor. But if it was

pretense, and nothing more, there was very actual kindliness in it. And

there was nothing left for me but to sit tight, and refill the little

lacquered gold cups when necessary, and smile non-committally when

Dinky-Dunk explained that my idea of Heaven was a place where husbands

were served _en brochette_, and emulate the Priest and the Levite by

passing by on the other side when Peter asked me if I'd ever heard that

the West was good for mules and men but hard on horses and women. And it

suddenly struck me as odd, the timidities and reticences which nature

imposes on our souls. It seemed so ridiculous that the three of us

couldn't sit there and unbosom our hearts of what was hidden away in

them, that we couldn't be open and honest and aboveboard and say just

what we felt and thought, that we couldn't quietly talk things out to an

end and find where each and all of us stood. But men and women are not

made that way. Otherwise, I suppose, life would be too Edenic, and we'd

part company with a very old and venerable interest in Paradise!

[Illustration: "She's not dead?" I asked in a breath]

_Saturday the Second_

Peter had arranged to come for us with a motor-car and carry us all

off to the Rose Tournament yesterday morning, "for I do want to be

sitting right next to that little tike of yours," he explained,

meaning Dinkie, "when he bumps into his first brass band!"

But little Dinkie didn't hear his brass band, and we didn't go to the

Rose Tournament, although it was almost at our doors and some eighty

thousand crowded automobiles foregathered here from the rest of the

state to get a glimpse of it. For Peter, who is staying at the Greene

here instead of at the Alexandria over in Los Angeles, presented

himself before I'd even sat down to breakfast and before lazy old

Dinky-Dunk was even out of bed.

Peter, I noticed, had a somewhat hollow look about the eye, but I

accepted it as nothing more than the after-effects of his long trip,

and blithely commanded him to sit down and partake of my coffee.

Peter, however, wasn't thinking about coffee.

"I'm afraid," he began, "that I'm bringing you rather--rather bad

news."

We stood for a moment with our gazes locked. He seemed appraising me,

speculating on just what effect this message of his might have on me.

"What is it?" I asked, with that forlorn tug at inner reserves which

life teaches us to send over the wire as we grow older.

"I've come," explained Peter, "simply because this thing would have

reached you a little later in your morning paper--and I hated the

thought of having it spring out at you that way. So you won't mind,

will you? You'll understand the motive behind the message?"

"But what is it?" I repeated, a little astonished by this obliquity in

a man customarily so direct.

"It's about Lady Newland," he finally said. And the solemnity of his

face rather frightened me.

"She's not dead?" I asked in a breath.

Peter shook his head from side to side.

"She's been rather badly hurt," he said, after several moments of

silence. "Her plane was winged yesterday afternoon by a navy flier

over San Diego Bay. She didn't fall, but it was a forced landing and

her machine had taken fire before they could get her out of her seat."

"You mean she was burnt?" I cried, chilled by the horror of it.

And, inapposite as it seemed, my thoughts flashed back to that lithe

and buoyant figure, and then to the picture of it charred and scorched

and suffering.

"Only her face," was Peter's quiet and very deliberate reply.

"Only her face," I repeated, not quite understanding him.

"The men from the North Bay field had her out a minute or two after

she landed. But practically the whole plane was afire. Her heavy

flying coat and gauntlets saved her body and hands. But her face was

unprotected. She--"

"Do you mean she'll be _disfigured_?" I asked, remembering the

loveliness of that face with its red and wilful lips and its

ever-changing tourmaline eyes.

"I'm afraid so," was Peter's answer. "But I've been wiring, and you'll

be quite safe in telling your husband that she's in no actual danger.

The Marine Hospital officials have acknowledged that no flame was

inhaled, that it's merely temporary shock, and, of course, the

face-burn."

"But what can they do?" I asked, in little more than a whisper.

"They're trying the new ambersine treatment, and later on, I suppose,

they can rely on skin-grafting and facial surgery," Peter explained to

me.

"Is it that bad?" I asked, sitting down in one of the empty chairs,

for the mere effort to vision any such disfigurement had brought a

Channel-crossing and Calais-packet feeling to me.

"It's very sad," said Peter, more ill-at-ease than I'd ever seen him

before, "But there's positively no danger, remember. It won't be so bad

as your morning paper will try to make it out. They've sensationalized

it, of course. That's why I wanted to be here first, and give you the

facts. They are distressing enough, God knows, without those yellow

reporters working them over for wire consumption."

I was glad that Peter didn't offer to stay, didn't even seem to wish

to stay. I wanted quietness and time to think the thing over.

Dinky-Dunk, I realized, would have to be told, and told at once. It

would, of course, be a shock to him. And it would be something more.

It would be a sudden crowding to some final issue of all those

possibilities which lay like spring-traps beneath the under-brush of

our indifference. I had no way of knowing what it was that had

attracted him to Lady Alicia. Beauty of face, of course, must have

been a factor in it. And that beauty was now gone. But love, according

to the Prophets and the Poets, overcometh all things. And in her very

helplessness, it was only too plain to me, his Cousin Allie might

appeal to him in a more personal and more perilous way. My Diddums

himself, of late, had appealed more to me in his weakness and his

unhappiness than in his earlier strength and triumph. There was a

time, in fact, when I had almost grown to hate his successes. And yet

he was my husband. He was _mine_. And it was a human enough instinct

to fight for what was one's own. But that wild-bird part of man known

as his will could never be caged and chained. If somewhere far off it

beheld beauty and nobility it must be free to wing its way where it

wished. The only bond that held it was the bond of free-giving and

goodness. And if it abjured such things as that, the sooner the flight

took place and the colors were shown, the better. If on the home-bough

beside him nested neither beauty nor nobility, it was only natural

that he should wander a-field for what I had failed to give him. And

now, in this final test, I must not altogether fail him. For once in

my life, I concluded, I had to be generous.

So I waited until Dinky-Dunk emerged. I waited, deep in thought, while

he splashed like a sea-lion in his bath, and called out to Struthers

almost gaily for his glass of orange-juice, and shaved, and opened and

closed drawers, and finished dressing and came out in his cool-looking

suit of cricketer's flannel, so immaculate and freshly-pressed that

one would never dream it had been bought in England and packed in

mothballs for four long years.

I heard him asking for the kiddies while I was still out in the

_patio_ putting the finishing touches to his breakfast-table, and his

grunt that was half a sigh when he learned that they'd been sent off

before he'd had a glimpse of them. And I could see him inhale a

lungful of the balmy morning air as he stood in the open doorway and

stared, not without approval, at me and the new-minted day.

"Why the clouded brow, Lady-Bird?" he demanded as he joined me at the

little wicker table.

"I've had some rather disturbing news," I told him, wondering just how

to begin.

"The kiddies?" he asked, stopping short.

I stared at him closely as I shook my head in answer to that question.

He looked leaner and frailer and less robustious than of old. But in

my heart of hearts I liked him that way. It left him the helpless and

unprotesting victim of that run-over maternal instinct of mine which

took wayward joy in mothering what it couldn't master. It had brought

him a little closer to me. But that contact, I remembered, was perhaps

to be only something of the moment.

"Dinky-Dunk," I told him as quietly as I could, "I want you to go down

to San Diego and see Lady Allie."

It was a less surprised look than a barricaded one that came into his

eyes.

"Why?" he asked as he slowly seated himself across the table from me.

"Because I think she needs you," I found the courage to tell him.

"Why?" he asked still again.

"There has been an accident," I told him.

"What sort of accident?" he quickly inquired, with one hand arrested

as he went to shake out his table-napkin.

"It was an air-ship accident. And Lady Allie's been hurt."

"Badly?" he asked, as our glances met.

"Not badly, in one way," I explained to him. "She's not in any danger,

I mean. But her plane caught fire, and she's been burned about the

face."

His lips parted slightly, as he sat staring at me. And slowly up into

his colorless face crept a blighted look, a look which brought a vague

yet vast unhappiness to me as I sat contemplating it.

"Do you mean she's disfigured," he asked, "that it's something she'll

always--"

"I'm afraid so," I said, when he did not finish his sentence.

He sat looking down at his empty plate for a long time.

"And you want me to go?" he finally said.

"Yes," I told him.

He was silent for still another ponderable space of time.

"But do you understand--" he began. And for the second time he didn't

finish his sentence.

"I understand," I told him, doing my best to sit steady under his

inquisitorial eye. Then he looked down at the empty plate again.

"All right," he said at last. He spoke in a quite flat and colorless

tone. But it masked a decision which we both must have recognized as

being momentous. And I knew, without saying anything further, that he

would go.

_Sunday the Third_

Dinky-Dunk left Friday night and got back early this morning before I

was up. This naturally surprised me. But what surprised me more was

the way he looked. He was white and shaken and drawn about the eyes.

He seemed so wretched that I couldn't help feeling sorry for him.

"_She wouldn't see me!_" was all he said as I stopped him on the way

to his room.

But he rather startled me, fifteen minutes later, by calling up the

Greene and asking for Peter. And before half an hour had dragged past

Peter appeared in person. He ignored the children, and apparently

avoided me, and went straight out to the pergola, where he and

Dinky-Dunk fell to pacing slowly up and down, with the shadows

dappling their white-clad shoulders like leopards as they walked up

and down, up and down, as serious and solemn as two ministers of state

in a national crisis. And something, I scarcely knew what, kept me

from going out and joining them.

It was Peter himself who finally came in to me. He surprised me, in

the first place, by shaking hands. He did it with that wistful

wandering-picador smile of his on his rather Zuloagaish face.

"I've got to say good-by," I found him saying to me.

"Peter!" I called out in startled protest, trying to draw back so I

could see him better. But he kept my hand.

"I'm going east to-night," he quite casually announced. "But above all

things I want you and your Dinky-Dunk to hang on here as long as you

can. _He_ needs it. I'm stepping out. No, I don't mean that, exactly,

for I'd never stepped in. But it's a fine thing, in this world, for

men and women to be real friends. And I know, until we shuffle off,

that we're going to be that!"

"Peter!" I cried again, trying not to choke up with the sudden sense

of deprivation that was battering my heart to pieces. And the light in

faithful old Peter's eyes didn't make it any easier.

But he dropped my hand, of a sudden, and went stumbling rather

awkwardly over the Spanish tiling as he passed out to the waiting car.

I watched him as he climbed into it, stiffly yet with a show of

careless bravado, for all the world like the lean-jowled knight of the

vanished fete mounting his bony old Rosinante.

It was nearly half an hour later that Dinky-Dunk came into the

cool-shadowed living-room where I was making a pretense of being busy

at cutting down some of Dinkie's rompers for Pee-Wee, who most

assuredly must soon bid farewell to skirts.

"Will you sit down, please?" he said with an abstracted sort of

formality. For he'd caught me on the wing, half-way back from the open

window, where I'd been glancing out to make sure Struthers was on

guard with the children.

My face was a question, I suppose, even when I didn't speak.

"There's something I want you to be very quiet and courageous about,"

was my husband's none too tranquillizing beginning. And I could feel

my pulse quicken.

"What is it?" I asked, wondering just what women should do to make

themselves quiet and courageous.

"It's about Allie," answered my husband, speaking so slowly and

deliberately that it sounded unnatural. "She shot herself last night.

She--she killed herself, with an army revolver she'd borrowed from a

young officer down there."

I couldn't quite understand, at first. The words seemed like

half-drowned things my mind had to work over and resuscitate and coax,

back into life.

"This is terrible!" I said at last, feebly, foolishly, as the meaning

of it all filtered through my none too active brain.

"It's terrible for me," acknowledged Dinky-Dunk, with a self-pity

which I wasn't slow to resent.

"But why aren't you there?" I demanded. "Why aren't you there to keep

a little decency about the thing? Why aren't you looking after what's

left of her?"

Dinky-Dunk's eye evaded mine, but only for a moment.

"Colonel Ainsley-Brook is coming back from Washington to take

possession of the remains," he explained with a sort of dry-lipped

patience, "and take them home."

"But why should an outsider like--"

Dinky-Dunk stopped me with a gesture.

"He and Allie were married, a little over three weeks ago," my husband

quietly informed me. And for the second time I had to work life into

what seemed limp and sodden words.

"Did you know about that?" I asked.

"Yes, Allie wrote to me about it, at the time," he replied with a sort

of coerced candor. "She said it seemed about the only thing left to

do."

"Why should she say that?"

Dinky-Dunk stared at me with something strangely like a pleading look

in his haggard eye.

"Wouldn't it be better to keep away from all that, at a time like

this?" he finally asked.

"No," I told him, "this is the time we _can't_ keep away from it. She

wrote you that because she was in love with you. Isn't that the

truth?"

Dinky-Dunk raised his hand, as though he were attempting a movement of

protest, and then dropped it again. His eyes, I noticed, were luminous

with a sort of inward-burning misery. But I had no intention of being

merciful. I had no chance of being merciful. It was like an operation

without ether, but it had to be gone through with. It had to be cut

out, in some way, that whole cancerous growth of hate and distrust.

"Isn't that the truth?" I repeated.

"Oh, Tabby, don't turn the knife in the wound!" cried Dinky-Dunk, with

his face more than ever pinched with misery.

"Then it _is_ a wound!" I proclaimed in dolorous enough triumph. "But

there's still another question, Dinky-Dunk, you must answer," I went

on, speaking as slowly and precisely as I could, as though deliberation

in speech might in some way make clearer a matter recognized as only

too dark in spirit. "And it must be answered honestly, without any

quibble as to the meaning of words. Were you in love with Lady Allie?"

His gesture of repugnance, of seeming self-hate, was both a prompt and

a puzzling one.

"That's the hideous, the simply hideous part of it all," he cried out

in a sort of listless desperation.

"Why hideous?" I demanded, quite clear-headed, and quite determined

that now or never the overscored slate of suspicion should be wiped

clean. I still forlornly and foolishly felt, I suppose, that he might

yet usher before me some miraculously simple explanation that would

wipe his scutcheon clean, that would put everything back to the older

and happier order. But as I heard his deep-wrung cry of "Oh, what's

the good of all this?" I knew that life wasn't so romantic as we're

always trying to make it.

"I've got to know," I said, as steel-cold as a surgeon.

"But can't you see that it's--that it's worse than revolting to me?"

he contended, with the look of a man harried beyond endurance.

"Why should it be?" I exacted.

He sank down in the low chair with the ranch-brand on its leather

back. It was an oddly child-like movement of collapse. But I daren't

let myself feel sorry for him.

"Because it's all so rottenly ignoble," he said, without looking at

me.

"For whom?" I asked, trying to speak calmly.

"For me--for you," he cried out, with his head in his hands. "For you

to have been faced with, I mean. It's awful, to think that you've had

to stand it!" He reached out for me, but I was too far away for him to

touch. "Oh, Tabby, I've been such an awful rotter. And this thing

that's happened has just brought it home to me."

"Then you cared, that much?" I demanded, feeling the bottom of my

heart fall out, for all the world like the floor of a dump-cart.

"No, no; that's the unforgivable part of it," he cried in quick

protest. "It's not only that I did you a great wrong, Tabby, but I did

_her_ a worse one. I coolly exploited something that I should have at

least respected. I manipulated and used a woman I should have been

more generous with. There wasn't even bigness in it, from my side of

the game. I traded on that dead woman's weakness. And my hands would

be cleaner if I could come to you with the claim that I'd really cared

for her, that I'd been swept off my feet, that passion had blinded me

to the things I should have remembered." He let his hands fall between

his knees. Knowing him as the man of reticence that he was, it seemed

an indescribably tragic gesture. And it struck me as odd, the next

moment, that he should be actually sobbing. "Oh, my dear, my dear, the

one thing I was blind to was your bigness, was your goodness. The one

thing I forgot was how true blue you could be."

I sat there staring at his still heaving shoulders, turning over what

he had said, turning it over and over, like a park-squirrel with a

nut. I found a great deal to think about, but little to say.

"I don't blame you for despising me," Dinky-Dunk said, out of the

silence, once more in control of himself.

"I was thinking of _her_," I explained. And then I found the courage

to look into my husband's face. "No, Dinky-Dunk, I don't despise you,"

I told him, remembering that he was still a weak and shaken man. "But

I pity you. I do indeed pity you. For it's selfishness, it seems to

me, which costs us so much, in the end."

He seemed to agree with me, by a slow movement of the head.

"That's the only glimmer of hope I have," he surprised me by saying.

"But why hope from _that_?" I asked.

"Because you're so utterly without selfishness," that deluded man

cried out to me. "You were always that way, but I didn't have the

brains to see it. I never quite saw it until you sent me down to--to

_her_." He came to a stop, and sat staring at the terra-cotta Spanish

floor-tiles. "_I_ knew it was useless, tragically useless. You didn't.

But you were brave enough to let my weakness do its worst, if it had

to. And that makes me feel that I'm not fit to touch you, that I'm not

even fit to walk on the same ground with you!"