The Prairie Mother. Stringer Arthur

had washed up and joined us. Yet I saw, when we sat down to our belated supper, that the fair Allie had the abundant and honest appetite of a healthy boy. She also asked if she might smoke between courses—which same worried the unhappy Dinky-Dunk much more than it did me. My risibilities remained untouched until she languidly remarked that any woman who had twins on the prairie ought to get a V.C.

      But she automatically became, I retorted, a K.C.B. This seemed to puzzle the cool-eyed Lady Alicia.

      “That means a Knight Commander of the Bath,” she said with her English literalness.

      “Exactly,” I agreed. And Dinky-Dunk had to come to her rescue and explain the joke, like a court-interpreter translating Cree to the circuit judge, so that by the time he got through it didn’t seem a joke at all and his eyes were flashing me a code-signal not to be too hard on a tenderfoot. When, later on, Lady Alicia looked about Casa Grande, which we’d toiled and moiled and slaved to make like the homestead prints in the immigration pamphlets, she languidly acknowledged that it was rather ducky, whatever that may mean, and asked Dinky-Dunk if there’d be any deer-shooting this spring. I notice, by the way, that she calls him “Dooncan” and sometimes “Cousin Doonk,” which strikes me as being over-intimate, seeing he’s really her second cousin. It seems suggestive of some hidden joke between them. And Duncan addresses her quite openly as “Allie.”

      This same Allie has brought a lady’s maid with her whom she addresses, more Anglico, simply by her surname of “Struthers.” Struthers is a submerged and self-obliterating and patient-eyed woman of nearly forty, I should say, with a face that would be both intelligent and attractive, if it weren’t so subservient. But I’ve a floaty sort of feeling that this same maid knows a little more than she lets on to know, and I’m wondering what western life will do to her. In one year’s time, I’ll wager a plugged nickel against an English sovereign, she’ll not be sedately and patiently dining at second-table and murmuring “Yes, me Lady” in that meek and obedient manner. But it fairly took my breath, the adroit and expeditious manner in which Struthers had that welter of luggage unstrapped and unbuckled and warped into place and things stowed away, even down to her ladyship’s rather ridiculous folding canvas bathtub. In little more than two shakes she had a shimmering litter of toilet things out on the dresser tops, and even a nickel alcohol-lamp set up for brewing the apparently essential cup of tea. It made me wish that I had a Struthers or two of my own on the string. And that made my thoughts go hurtling back to my old Hortense and how we had parted at the Hotel de L’Athenee, and to Theobald Gustav and his aunt the Baroness, and the old lost life that seemed such years and years away. …

      But I promptly put the lid down on those over-disturbing reminiscences. There should be no post-mortems in this family circle, no jeremiads over what has gone before. This is the New World and the new age where life is too crowded for regrets. I am a woman twenty-seven years old, married and the mother of three children. I am the wife of a rancher who went bust in a land-boom and is compelled to start life over again. I must stand beside him, and start from the bottom. I must also carry along with me all the hopes and prospects of three small lives. This, however, is something which I refuse to accept as a burden and a handicap. It is a weight attached to me, of course, but it’s only the stabilizing weight which the tail contributes to the kite, allowing it, in the end, to fly higher and keep steadier. It won’t seem hard to do without things, when I think of those kiddies of mine, and hard work should be a great and glorious gift, if it is to give them the start in life which they deserve. We’ll no longer quarrel, Diddums and I, about whether Dinkie shall go to Harvard or McGill. There’ll be much closer problems than that, I imagine, before Dinkie is out of his knickers. Fate has shaken us down to realities—and my present perplexity is to get possession of six new milk-pans and that new barrel-churn, not to mention the flannelette I simply must have for the Twins’ new nighties! …

Saturday the Eleventh

       Table of Contents

      These imperturbable English! I didn’t know whether I should take off my hat to ’em or despise ’em. They seem to come out of a different mold to what we Americans do. Lady Alicia takes everything as a matter of course. She seems to have accepted one of the finest ranches west of the Peg as impassively as an old work-horse accepts a new shoe. Even the immensity of our western prairie-land hasn’t quite stumped her. She acknowledged that Casa Grande was “quaint,” and is obviously much more interested in Iroquois Annie, the latter being partly a Redskin, than in my humble self. I went up in her estimation a little, however, when I coolly accepted one of her cigarettes, of which she has brought enough to asphyxiate an army. I managed it all right, though it was nearly four long years since I’d flicked the ash off the end of one—in Chinkie’s yacht going up to Monte Carlo. But I was glad enough to drop the bigger half of it quietly into my nasturtium window-box, when the lady wasn’t looking.

      The lady in question, by the way, seems rather disappointed to find that Casa Grande has what she called “central heating.” About the middle of next February, when the thermometer is flirting with the forty-below mark, she may change her mind. I suppose the lady expected to get a lodge and a deer-park along with her new home, to say nothing of a picture ’all—open to the public on Fridays, admission one shilling—and a family ghost, and, of course, a terrace for the aforesaid ghost to ambulate along on moonlight nights.

      But the thing that’s been troubling me, all day long, is: Now that Lady Alicia has got her hand-made ranch, what’s she going to do with it? I scarcely expect her to take me into her confidence on the matter, since she seems intent on regarding me as merely a bit of the landscape. The disturbing part of it all is that her aloofness is so unstudied, so indifferent in its lack of deliberation. It makes me feel like a bump on a log. I shouldn’t so much mind being actively and martially snubbed, for that would give me something definite and tangible to grow combative over. But you can’t cross swords with a Scotch mist.

      With Dinky-Dunk her ladyship is quite different. I never see that look of mild impatience in her opaque blue eyes when he is talking. She flatters him openly, in fact, and a man takes to flattery, of course, as a kitten takes to cream. Yet with all her outspokenness I am conscious of a tremendous sense of reservation. Already, more than once, she has given me a feeling which I’d find it very hard to describe, a feeling as though we were being suspended over peril by something very fragile. It’s the feeling you have when you stand on one of those frail little Alpine bridges that can sway so forebodingly with your own weight and remind you that nothing but a rustic paling or two separates you from the thousand-footed abysses below your heels.

      But I mustn’t paint the new mistress of Casa Grande all in dark colors. She has her good points, and a mind of her own, and a thought or two of her own. Dinky-Dunk was asking her about Egypt. That country, she retorted, was too dead for her. She couldn’t wipe out of her heart the memory of what man had suffered along the banks of the Nile, during the last four thousand years, what millions of men had suffered there because of religion and war and caste.

      “I could never be happy in a country of dead races and dead creeds and dead cities,” protested Lady Alicia, with more emotion than I had expected. “And those are the things that always stare me in the face out there.”

      This brought the talk around to the New World.

      “I rather fancy that a climate like yours up here,” she coolly observed, “would make luxuries of furniture and dress, and convert what should be the accidents of life into essentials. You will always have to fight against nature, you know, and that makes man attach more importance to the quest of comfort. But when he lives in the tropics, in a surrounding that leaves him with few desires, he has time to sit down and think about his soul. That’s why you can never have a great musician or a great poet in your land of blizzards, Cousin Dooncan. You are all kept too busy laying up nuts for the winter. You can’t afford to turn gipsy and go off star-gazing.”

      “You can if you join the I. W. W.,” I retorted. But the allusion was lost on her.

      “I can’t imagine a Shelley