Lady Allie couldn’t have been picked quite clean to the bone by the McKails, for she’s announced her intention of buying a touring-car and a gasoline-engine and has had a conference with Dinky-Dunk on the matter. She also sent to Montreal for the niftiest little English sailor suit, for Dinkie, together with a sailor hat that has “Agamemnon” printed in gold letters on its band.

I ought to be enthusiastic about it, but I can’t. Dinkie himself, however, who calls it his “new nailor nuit”—not being yet able to manage the sibilants—struts about in it proud as a peacock, and refuses to sit down in his supper-chair until Ikkie has carefully wiped off the seat of the same, to the end that the beloved nailor nuit might remain immaculate. He’ll lose his reverence for it, of course, when he knows it better. It’s a habit men have, big or little.

Lady Allie has confessed that she is succumbing to the charm of prairie life. It ought to make her more of a woman and less of a silk-lined idler. Dinky-Dunk still nurses the illusion that she is delicate, and manages to get a lot of glory out of that clinging-vine pose of hers, big oak that he is! But it is simply absurd, the way he falls for her flattery. She’s making him believe that he’s a twentieth-century St. Augustine and a Saint Christopher all rolled into one. Poor old Dinky-Dunk, I’ll have to keep an eye on him or they’ll be turning his head, for all its gray hairs. He is wax in the hand of designing beauty, as are most of the race of man. And the fair Allie, I must acknowledge, is dangerously appealing to the eye. It’s no wonder poor old Dinky-Dunk nearly broke his neck trying to teach her to ride astride. But I intend to give her ladyship an inkling, before long, that I’m not quite so stupid as I seem to be. She mustn’t imagine she can “vamp” my Kaikobad with impunity. It’s a case of any port in a storm, I suppose, for she has to practise on somebody. But I must say she looks well on horseback and can lay claim to a poise that always exacts its toll of respect. She rides hard, though I imagine she would be unwittingly cruel to her mount. Yet she has been more offhanded and friendly, the last two or three times she has dropped over to the shack, and she is kind to the kiddies, especially Dinkie. She seems genuinely and unaffectedly fond of him. As for me, she thinks I’m hard, I feel sure, and is secretly studying me—trying to decipher, I suppose, what her sainted cousin could ever see in me to kick up a dust about!

Lady Allie’s London togs, by the way, make me feel rather shoddy and slattern. I intend to swing in a little stronger for personal adornment, as soon as we get things going again. When a woman gives up, in that respect, she’s surely a goner. And I may be a hard-handed and slabsided prairie huzzy, but there was a time when I stood beside the big palms by the fountain in the conservatory of Prince Ernest de Ligne’s Brussels house in the Rue Montoyer and the Marquis of What-Ever-His-Name-Was bowed and set all the orders on his chest shaking when he kissed my hand and proclaimed that I was the most beautiful woman in Belgium!

Yes, there was such a time. But it was a long, long time ago, and I never thought then I’d be a rancher’s wife with a barrel-churn to scald out once a week and a wheezy old pump to prime in the morning and a little hanging garden of Babylon full of babies to keep warm and to keep fed and to keep from falling on their boneless little cocos! I might even have married Theobald Gustav von Brockdorff and turned into an embassy ball lizard and ascended into the old family landau of his aunt the baroness, to disport along the boulevards therein very much like an oyster on the half-shell. I might have done all that, and I might not. But it’s all for the best, as the greatest pessimist who ever drew the breath of life once tried to teach in his Candide. And in my career, as I have already written, there shall be no jeremiads.