This change to the city means a new life to my children. But I can also see it means new dangers and new influences. The simplicity of ranch life has vanished. And Dinkie and Poppsy are already getting acquainted with their neighbors. A Ford truck came within an inch of running over Poppsy this morning. She has announced a curiosity to investigate ice-cream sodas, and Dinkie has proclaimed his intention of going to the movies Saturday afternoon with Benny McArthur, the banker’s son in the next block. On Monday I’m to take my children to school. “One of the finest school-buildings in all the West,” Duncan has proudly explained. I can’t help thinking of Gershom and his little cubby-hole of a wooden building where he is even now so solemnly and yet so kind-heartedly teaching the three R’s to a gathering of little prairie outlaws.

I shall have time on my hands, I see, for Hilton and his wife, our English gardener-chauffeur and our portly maid-of-all-work, pretty well cover what the 303 wonderful Tokudo overlooks. And Tokudo is a wonder. That cat-footed little Jap does the ordering and cooking and serving; he answers the door and the telephone; he attends to the rugs and the hardwood floors; he rules over the butler’s pantry and polishes the silver and inspects the linen, and even keeps the keys to Duncan’s carefully guarded wine-cellar, which the mistress of the house herself has not yet dared to invade.

My husband seems to be very busy with his coal-mines and his other interests. He said last night that his idea of happiness is to be so immersed in his work as to be unconscious of time and undisturbed by its passing. And he has been happy, in that way. But Time, that patient remodeler of all things mortal, can still work while we sleep. And something has been happening, without Duncan quite knowing it. He has changed. He is older, for one thing. I don’t mean that my husband is an old man. But I can see a number of early-autumnal alterations in him. He’s a trifle heavier and stiffer. He’s lost a bit of his springiness. And he seems to know it, in his secret heart of hearts, for he tries to make up for that loss with a sort of coerced blitheness which doesn’t always carry. He affects a sort of creaking jauntiness which 304 sometimes falls short of its aim. When he can’t clear the hurdle, I notice, he has the habit of whipping up his tired spirits with a cocktail or a highball or a silver-fizz. But he is preoccupied, at times. And at other times he is disturbingly short-tempered. He announced this morning, almost gruffly, that we’d had about enough of this “Dinkie and Poppsy business,” and the children might as well be called by their real names. So I shall make another effort to get back to “Elmer” and “Pauline Augusta.” But I feel, in my bones, that those pompous appellatives will not be always remembered. It has just occurred to me that my old habit of calling my husband “Dinky-Dunk” has slipped away from me. Endearing diminutives, I suppose, are not elicited by polar bears.